Griffin Museum of Science and Industry celebrates women in energy for Women's History Month

In honor of Women's History Month, the Griffin Museum of Science and Industry is honoring women trailblazers in the energy field.

The museum is featuring a pop-up exhibit and digital display in its rotunda, highlighting more than 50 women who have helped to shape the future of energy, and who have advocated for doing so in an environmentally responsible fashion.

The Griffin MSI noted that women have been at the forefront of the energy industry — and discoveries about the environment — for much longer than they've been given credit.

In the 1850s, Eunice Newton Foote conducted experiments demonstrating how atmospheric water vapor and carbon dioxide affect solar heating — resulting in the discovery of the greenhouse effect, and foreshadowing later work by John Tyndall that described how the effect worked, according to Climate.gov.

But Foote didn't get credit for her work until 2011, by which point she had been deceased for 123 years.

The Griffin MSI also noted that Hungarian American scientist Maria Telkes harnessed the power of the sun to create the first ever solar-heated home.

Even in 2026, women only make up 25% of the energy workforce, the Griffin MSI said. But women also continue to shape the future of energy.

The women in energy whose stories the Griffin MSI is highlighting include:

• Meena Beyers, vice president of business and community development for Nicor Gas.
• Valerie Colletti, senior vice president of distribution operations for ComEd.
• Valerie Downs, operations and maintenance manager for the global energy company Invenergy.
• Anne Evens, chief executive officer of the clean energy nonprofit Elevate.
• Xiaohui Gong, a Ph.D. candidate at Northwestern University who studies batteries to collect and store renewable energy.
• Stephanie Hagopian, vice president of security solutions for the information technology company CDW.
• Maya Huggins-Garcia, senior manager of corporate relations for Exelon, who leads philanthropic development and STEM education strategies.
• Smriti Jain, senior vice president for technology and software engineering for CDW.
• Katherine Kroemer, process engineering department head at Corning Inc.
• Natalie Labrador, director of storage strategy at Invenergy.
• Carrie McDougall, acting director and senior associate scientist at the University of Colorado-Boulder's Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences Center for Education, Engagement and Evaluation.
• Naghmeh Mehraeen, a Ph.D. candidate in geomechanics at Northwestern, who investigates who extreme conditions such as drastic temperature shifts affect the behavior of soils, and applies the research to underground thermal energy storage facilities.
• Y. Shirley Meng, Liew Family Professor at the University of Chicago's Pritzker School of Molecular Engineering and the director of the Energy Storage Research Alliance at Argonne National Laboratory, who focuses on how to store and optimize renewable energy.
• Andrea Simmons, overhead crew leader and behavior, accident, prevention, process facilitator at ComEd, who works on analyzing data to prevent injuries.
• Elizabeth Stelzer, project leader for Hemlock Semiconductor, who helps make polysilicon used in solar panels even cleaner.
• Susannah Sun, business operations manager for Green Era, which turns food waste into renewable energy.
• Valerie Taylor, director of the mathematics and computer science division and Argonne distinguished fellow at Argonne National Laboratory, who focuses on high-performance computing for energy efficiency.
• Kristen Wahl, advanced energy workforce director for Argonne National Laboratory.
• Angela C. Whitfield, director of operations and technical standards for Nicor Gas/Southern Gas Company, who supports people who work with natural gas.
• Lindy Wordlaw, assistant commissioner of the Chicago Department of Environment.