Vikram Yadav, a chemical engineering assistant professor who joined UBC’s faculty of applied science four years ago, is using some of the world’s tiniest creatures—yeasts and bacteria—to find solutions for some weighty problems.
Vikram Yadav, a chemical engineering assistant professor who joined UBC’s faculty of applied science four years ago, is using some of the world’s tiniest creatures—yeasts and bacteria—to find solutions for some weighty problems.
Last year, his team developed a unique eye drop that uses a cannabinoid compound produced by microbes to treat glaucoma. The drops help shield the optic nerve from pressure that, left untreated, can progress to glaucoma, the number one cause of irreversible blindness in the world.
Yadav has also designed a solar cell powered by the common E. coli bacteria. In a master stroke of genetic engineering, he and his team found that the bug could be tweaked to squirt copious amounts of an energy-producing dye. The result is a solar cell capable of producing significantly more energy than any other biological solar cells on the market.
Now Yadav is setting his sights on one of the toughest environmental dilemmas in Canada’s resource industry: cleaning up oil sands tailings ponds that hold millions of litres of contaminated water produced by bitumen mining.
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