Sossina m haile biography

Sossina M. Haile is an Ethiopian-American chemist, known for developing the first solid acid fuel cells.
Sossina M. Haile is an Ethiopian-American chemist, known for developing the first solid acid fuel cells.
Professor of Materials Science and Chemical Engineering Sossina Haile was born on July 28, 1966 in Addis Adeba, Ethiopia.

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Plugging into the Power of Hydrogen

Sossina M. Haile ’86, PhD ’92 has spent her career laying the groundwork for a future in which humans succeed in heating homes, powering industry, and fueling transportation without polluting the planet.

“It is important to me that the whole world has access to electricity, and we do it in a way that’s not adding to our carbon footprint,” says Haile, the Murphy Professor of Materials Science and Engineering and professor of applied physics at Northwestern University.

Well known for pioneering the solid acid fuel cell—an emissions-free way to generate electricity from hydrogen, Haile is the author of hundreds of papers and holds more than a dozen patents relevant to sustainable energy technologies. In 2020, the Materials Research Society recognized her fundamental contributions to materials science with its David Turnbull Lectureship—one of the most prestigious honors in the field.

Immigrant from Ethiopia

Born in Ethiopia, Haile was forced to flee the country in the wake of the 1974 Communist revolution there. She was just shy of her 10

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Tapping Into All of Me

Dr. Sossina M. Haile is the Walter P. Murphy Professor of Materials Science and Engineering and Professor of Applied Physics at Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois, USA. She is known for her research in sustainable energy materials.

In deciding where and how to volunteer, to spend precious time and energy, I look for opportunities where I can make an outsized impact. This has brought me to Ethiopia Education Initiatives (EEI). I’m a proud member of the board of EEI, and am gratified to support the school we founded, Haile-Manas Academy (HMA), especially in my fields of material science engineering and education. As a person born in Ethiopia and brought up in America, I’m uniquely able to make contributions that support the mission of HMA.

Stateless - that’s what the US State department stamped in our immigration documents in 1976 when we first came to the US as refugees, and for years I thought the word was incredibly romantic. Maybe because I’d had the fortune to immigrate to America, where, it seemed to us back then, the possibi

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Abstract:

Solar-driven thermochemical production of chemical fuels using redox active oxides has emerged as an attractive means for storing solar energy for use on demand. In this process a reactive oxide is cyclically exposed at high temperatures to an inert gas, which induces partial reduction of the oxide, and to an oxidizing gas of either H2O or CO2, which reduces the oxide, releasing H2 or CO. The capacity for fuel production is dictated by the thermodynamic properties of the oxide, specifically the enthalpy and entropy of reduction. We compare the thermochemical fuel production behavior of a variety of oxides, including those of the fluorite structure-type (ceria and its derivatives) and those of the perovskite structure-type (La1-xSrxMnO3). A shared characteristic of the most promising materials is that bulk oxygen diffusion (chemical diffusion) is fast such that fuel production rates are limited either by surface reaction kinetics or, at high temperatures, gas-phase mass flow rates. We develop an analytical model to treat the behavior under gas-phase limited behavior