Haile, now at Northwestern University, recalls thinking that Abate was particularly eager. As a visible Ethiopian scientist, she gets a lot of email requests, but his stood out. “No obstacle was going to stand in his way,” she says. It was risky to take on a young student with no research experience who’d only been in the US for a year, but she offered him a spot in her lab. Abate spent the summer working on materials for use in solid oxide fuel cells. He returned for the following summer, then held a string of positions in energy-materials research, including at IBM and Los Alamos National Lab, before completing his graduate degree at Stanford and postdoctoral work at the University of California, Berkeley. Meet the rest of this year's Innovators Under 35. He joined the MIT faculty in 2023 and set out to build a research group of his own. Today, there are two major focuses of his lab. One is sodium-ion batteries, which are a popular alternative to the lithium-based cells used in EVs and grid storage installations. Sodium-ion batteries don’t require the kinds of critical minerals lithium-ion batteries do, which can be both expensive and tied up by geopolitics. One major stumbling block for sodium-ion batteries is their energy density. It’s possible to improve energy density by operating at higher voltages, but some of the materials used tend to degrade quickly at high voltages. That limits the total energy density of the battery, so it’s a problem for applications like electric vehicles, where a low energy density would restrict range. Abate’s team is developing materials that could extend the lifetime of sodium-ion batteries while avoiding the need for nickel, which is considered a critical mineral in the US. The team is examining additives and testing materials-engineering techniques to help the batteries compete with lithium-ion cells. Irons in the fire Another vein of Abate’s work is in some ways a departure from his history in batteries and fuel cells. In January, his team published research describing a process to make ammonia underground, using naturally-occurring heat and pressure to drive the necessary chemical reactions.