Nancy Haegel
Nancy Haegel, center director for materials science at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL), leads a national laboratory team working to understand and improve the generation of electricity directly from sunlight, a process known as photovoltaics (PV). Haegel, a member of Research Corporation for Science Advancement’s Board of Directors, is optimistic about the future of photovoltaics, and renewable energy in general.
“The rate of change is incredibly impressive,” she says. “For PV the world will reach roughly half a terawatt of installed capacity by the end of this year. PV’s contribution to global energy supplies is still small, only a few percent, but with the rate of change we’re seeing, the potential is there to have a major impact over the next five to 10 years. California is already at 17 percent of its electricity coming from PV. And there are other examples of tremendous progress in Europe and elsewhere. So it’s becoming a question of not if, but how, and how quickly. It’s a massive system undergoing a quick rate of change.”
She adds that wind, biomass, and water power will also play important roles in a totally renewable energy system. “Now we have to couple that work with advances in storage, and to work on the electrification of other parts of the energy sector, like transportation, where we need solar-generated fuels. So there are plenty of research challenges ahead, but we can now see our way toward an energy system that is sustainable, defossilized, and prosperous.”
As a research scientist, Haegel’s piece of the renewable energy puzzle comes down to understanding how an electron, the tiny particle that carries electrical charge, excited by its encounter with a photon, a massless particle of light, makes its way through semiconductor material on its way to becoming an electric current.
“We image transport,” she explains. “When we make an electron charge in a material, I want to be able to watch it move internally, and because electrons that move in semiconductors often give off light you can do this. We do this with near-field optics. I initiated that work and got my first NSF grant for it many years ago, and I’ve continued it ever since; and we’re doing some of that at NREL today. “
Haegel realized she was interested in science when she encountered high school physics. A National Merit Scholar, she saw physics as “an extremely exciting and powerful way to think. I enjoyed the combination of the mathematics with the physical understanding,” she recalls.
Although she was also interested in history, she decided to major in materials science at Notre Dame. She says she liked the program’s strong ties to physics as well as the opportunities it presented to envision new materials and new applications.
“Materials science is a combination of the experimental, the theoretical and the mathematical,” she notes. “In principle that’s true with any engineering discipline. But I was probably more interested, even then, in thinking at an electron scale rather than at a bridge scale, meaning macroscopic bridge. So that’s probably what drew me more to that discipline than to, say, mechanical or civil engineering.” Because of that interest, she took a number of extra physics courses.
Haegel hadn’t planned on going to graduate school – “I didn’t know how graduate school worked, or what enabled people to go,” she recalls – but when she graduated in 1981 she was awarded a National Science Foundation fellowship to make the leap, and she took it.
Concurrently, she was just beginning to realize how much she enjoyed research -- “being in the lab, asking questions, having work where you’re constantly asking new questions, learning new things.” She looked at the top graduate schools in materials science, and settled on the University of California, Berkeley. “There was just an energy there that I found appealing,” she recalls. “The national lab there [Lawrence Berkeley National Lab] played a key role in my decision. It just felt like the right fit.”
At Berkeley Haegel moved into the field of electronic materials. “It was a nice way to be involved in this physics-oriented electronics, atomic-scale work and yet be able to tie to real applications that have impact in the world,” she says. She began working with Prof. Eugene E. Haller, describing him as “an excellent advisor. We remained friends until his death this past summer. And he also had quite a few women in his group for those days. I don’t think that was necessarily a big factor in my decision, but he was really passionate about science and engineering and materials, and happy to share that with whatever motivated students came to his group.”
At the time she wasn’t thinking about the advantages of photovoltaics for power generation, which would later come to play an important role in her career. “I was just concentrating on the science. My thesis involved making semiconductor detectors for space astronomy. The theme of my work has been materials and electronic materials with applications. I’ve done some work in nuclear radiation detection, and now photovoltaics and other energy technologies.”
Her post-doctoral work took her to Siemens Research Laboratory in Germany, her first time living abroad. The work was centered at Siemens, but she and her colleagues collaborated extensively with the Max Planck Institute in Stuttgart. “It was a great opportunity to see that bridge between an industrial laboratory and a basic science lab.” Her focus was semiconductors, specifically the light-emitting qualities and other applications of materials like gallium arsenide and indium oxides.
“I was able to see for the first time that science is a truly international enterprise, an international community,” Haegel says of her postdoc experience. “And that’s been important for me downstream. I’ve continued to try to be part of that, especially with the students I’ve had at universities.” Later in her career, a Humboldt Fellowship would take her back to Germany, and she was also selected as a Fulbright Senior Scholar in Israel.
She returned from Germany and immediately went to work at the University of California, Los Angeles. It taught her an important lesson: “When I was considering the postdoc at Siemens, a number of people, though not my official adviser, told me not to do that. They said, ‘Oh, an industrial postdoc is not good if you want to be a faculty member. Going abroad is not good if you want to come back to the U.S. It’s hard to get a faculty job after that.’ Well that was all wrong.”
Haegel went to UCLA as an assistant professor in the materials science department, where she continued working on electronic materials, developing expertise in very high-resistivity materials and low-temperature transport (which came from her earlier work in space astronomy). After three years, she earned tenure.
Also at UCLA she began teaching. “That classroom component of education became really important to me,” she says. “The classroom is a special place and I really enjoyed being in it. I taught both undergrads and graduate students there.”
Subsequently, family responsibilities drew her to Connecticut, where she taught at Fairfield University, a Jesuit, primarily undergraduate institution (PUI).
“That’s one of the features of my career, that I’ve spent time at a number of places, usually in 10-year increments. I don’t move around quickly and easily, but I’ve taught at a PUI, I’ve taught at an R1, and I’ve also taught at the Naval Postgraduate School. “
Haegel subscribes to the vision of the “subject-centered classroom” advocated by author, educator and activist Parker Palmer: “He says you can have a professor-centered classroom, you can have a student-centered classroom, but he offers up this idea of the subject-centered, which I love, where we’re gathered around the subject as our common interest, and we all have a part to play in that. So when we teach, the subject comes to the fore. How your students engage or how they best relate might differ with different populations, but this idea about being driven by a common interest, hopefully love at some point, for the discipline, is the ideal no matter what your classroom population. That’s our goal.”
At Fairfield she continued to develop her teaching philosophy and skills, putting undergraduates in research settings. At the PUI she learned to work with other disciplines, including the humanities; she also learned to do outreach with local public schools. And during this period she continued her NSF-funded research and focused on emerging space satellite projects for NASA, which was related to the transport imaging work she continues today.
After nearly a decade, and ready for a change of scenery – her husband, Bill Davison, wanted to live out West – Haegel took a job teaching physics at the Naval Postgraduate School (NPS) in Monterrey, California.
“I applied, I’ll admit, on a bit of a whim, but after some interviewing and some negotiating back and forth, we did it,” Haegel says. “And again, a great 10 years. The students were active-duty military U.S., but also from around the world. It was a privilege to contribute to their education. Adult learners are focused and motivated. I made a lot of great friends there.”
Over the years she has won numerous teaching awards and mentored more than 30 students, many of whom she stays in contact with, including those from NPS as well as from UCLA and Fairfield.
Meanwhile, her research continued to evolve along the general theme -- materials and electronic materials with applications – she had developed beginning with her stint at Siemens. “At NPS there was a great deal of interest in new materials for electronic applications. At that institution you could have a wide spectrum of work, from pretty fundamental to much more applied. And so I continued my NSF work on imaging transport, but we also did some work on using new technologies [mostly nanoemitters] for identifying friend or foe to try to limit battlefield casualties.”
Eventually the National Renewable Energy Laboratory reached out to her because it was looking to expand some of its materials science work into related areas beyond strictly photovoltaics.
“I interviewed and decided it was a great opportunity, a great mission,” Haegel recalls.
The organization she oversees today within NREL, including all visiting scientists and contingent workers, includes about 180 people.
“It’s a great opportunity to give back,” she says of her duties as an administrator, “to try to create an environment like the ones I’ve benefitted from, where you can do good and important work. And in terms of NREL’s mission, it’s really a critical time for this. And not only to advance our knowledge in sustainable energy, but to transfer that knowledge to companies and to other actors that are going to have to be part of this evolution. We must move to sustainable energy systems.
Nancy Haegel, through her research, teaching and administrative skills, is well placed to help the world do just that.
