The Global Energy Transition | Buffett First Friday Lunch with Sossina Haile

The Roberta Buffett Institute hosts a faculty research lunchtime talk series on the first Friday of every month. Faculty members give a half-hour talk intended for a broad, multidisciplinary audience of Northwestern University students, faculty and staff, followed by a conversational Q&A. April's Buffett First Friday Lunch will feature Sossina Haile, Walter P. Murphy Professor of Materials Science & Engineering at Northwestern’s McCormick School of Engineering. The impacts of climate change, predicted by scientists for decades, are now undeniable. While adaptation will be required to support humanity on a changed planet, sustainable energy technologies stand to mitigate the severity of the transition. Professor Haile will discuss technological solutions pursued in her lab to meet energy demands without increasing the carbon burden in the atmosphere. The approaches include fuel cells, which convert the chemical energy of fuels like hydrogen into electrical energy, and electrolyzers, which perform the opposite, by using solar and wind electricity to generate hydrogen for long-duration storage. Each technology requires advanced materials that produce the desired functionality, last decades, and are based on earth-abundant elements. While US government policies have been erratic, the steady advances in the field suggests that a transition to a carbon-free energy scenario, though slow in its progress, is already happening. Doors open at 12:00 p.m., and lunch begins at 12:15 p.m. Please note that 720 University Place is not an ADA-accessible space. Increasing physical access to buildings and facilities is a goal of the University, but not all buildings and venues have been updated. About the speaker Sossina M. Haile’s research broadly encompasses materials for sustainable electrochemical energy technologies. Among her many awards, in 2008 Haile received an American Competitiveness & Innovation (ACI) Fellowship from the US National Science Foundation and in 2025 the Sosman Award of the American Ceramics Society. She is a fellow of the Materials Research Society, the American Ceramics Society, the Electrochemical Society, the Royal Society of Chemistry, the African Academy of Sciences, and the Ethiopian Academy of Sciences. She is the incoming Vice President of the Materials Research Society, and she serves on the editorial advisory boards of Joule and MRS Energy and Sustainability.