Sossina Haile: 'I never resonated with role models'
The fuel cell pioneer discusses her childhood in Ethiopia and the US, life as a scientist and being the ‘only one in the room’
I was born in Ethiopia. When I was very young – from age two to four – we lived in the US. This was because my father was an academic. After we went back to Ethiopia, I attended a British school. That basically meant that I spoke English as my first language, and I even had a British accent at the time.
There was a communist revolution in 1974 and we were lucky enough to be able to flee the country. I was almost 10 when my sisters and I got out – our parents had left about seven months earlier because soldiers came to our house to try and arrest my father. They shot my dad that night. Miraculously, he and my mom were able to get to a hospital in England not long after. My sisters and I were staying with our two aunts, waiting until we could get out too.