SOSSINA HAILE

Walter P. Murphy Professor of Materials Science and Engineering and Professor of Applied Physics at Northwestern University

Originally from Ethiopia, Sossina came to the U.S. in 1976 as a refugee. After high school in Minnesota, Sossina got her undergrad degree at MIT, a master's from UC Berkeley, and her Ph.D. from MIT and became a postdoctoral scholar in Germany. She is now at Northwestern University working on batteries, fuel cells, and hydrogen.

“The language is in some sense the language of truth, that we are looking for fundamental truths in the way the world works and then applying those truths to engineering solutions. So that is a shared common aspect among scientists and engineers across the world.”

Sossina believes we have an opportunity to get things right in countries that are at the early stages of grid development. They can skip the grid and go straight to decentralized, clean electric generation in the same way that they are skipping landlines and using smartphones as their first mode of telecommunication. She emphasizes the importance of providing equal access to clean, safe, and reliable electricity to the entire world.

Sossina is focused on getting the most out of our renewable energy resources. Solar and wind are intermittent. They generate electricity when the sun is shining and the wind is blowing. We can’t control the sun or the wind. They can create more electricity than we are using and sometimes they aren’t making enough. Sossina’s research solves the problem of intermittency by using the excess electricity generated by solar during the day to create hydrogen which can be stored until it is needed. In a fuel cell, hydrogen combines with oxygen to create water. The reaction gives us energy in the form of electricity. This process of creating hydrogen and then using it to create electricity is 100% carbon-free.

Sossina is excited when she explains how carbon-free electricity can be delivered to those who live without it. “Ethiopia's got a great hydroelectric resource but a lousy grid and of course the dams are very far from where people live. And so if you can convert that into some sort of chemical fuel, that's a lot easier to ship than trying to put it on a power line .”

Hydrogen can replace fossil fuels like petroleum in transportation. So we can produce our transportation fuels from the sun, wind, and water.