Prof. Ricca Slone has been teaching graduate public policy courses in Northwestern University’s School of Professional Studies for the past 12 years.  Most recently, she taught an online course on Congressional procedure in Fall 2023.  Before teaching at Northwestern University, Prof. Slone worked on water-supply issues for three years at the Environmental Law & Policy Center, a research and advocacy organization based in Chicago which works in several U.S. Midwestern states.  From 1997 to 2005, Prof. Slone served four terms as a state representative in the Illinois House of Representatives, representing the 92nd district in central Illinois.  She also chaired the Higher Education Appropriations Committee and was the vice chair of the Energy & Environment Committee.

As a senior scholar near the end of her working years, Prof. Slone hopes to rejuvenate the Sun Oven project by relaunching the assembling and marketing of solar ovens from a new location in Karnataka so that they can help women in South India who cook over wood fires.

Prof. Slone’s Fulbright-Nehru project is identifying strategies to overcome Indian cultural challenges to adopting renewable technologies.  The framework for analysis is Nordgren and Schonthal’s friction theory (The Human Element, 2022).  The project’s focus is on adoption of clean solar cooking by rural Indian women who otherwise cook over smoky fires, which is time consuming and causes respiratory diseases and deforestation.  The research is a case study comparing the relative ease of adoption of the following technologies: wind turbines for energy; electric tuk-tuks for mobility; and solar ovens for cooking.  Prof. Slone’s hypothesis is that cooking will encounter the most cultural resistance.