Nobel laureate John Goodenough, who pioneered the development of lithium-ion batteries that now power millions of electric vehicles around the world, will celebrate his 101st birthday just one month later. He passed away on Sunday.
Jay Hertzell, president of the University of Texas at Austin, where Goodenough was on the faculty for 37 years, said the American “has been a leader on the cutting edge of scientific research throughout his decades-long career.”
Goodenough won the 2019 Nobel Prize in Chemistry at the age of 97 for his work on lithium-ion batteries, along with Stanley Whittingham of the United Kingdom and Akira Yoshino of Japan, making him the oldest Nobel laureate.
“This rechargeable battery laid the foundation for wireless electronic devices such as mobile phones and laptops,” said the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences in accepting the award.
“It will also be used for everything from powering electric vehicles to storing energy from renewable sources, making a world without fossil fuels possible.”
In recent years, Goodenough and his university team have also explored new directions for energy storage, such as ‘glass’ batteries with solid electrolytes and lithium or sodium metal electrodes.
Goodenough was also an early developer of lithium iron phosphate (LFP) cathodes as an alternative to nickel- and cobalt-based cathodes. Experts say LFP is rapidly overtaking more expensive nickel-cobalt-manganese in electric vehicle batteries because it uses a much lower cost, more abundant and sustainable material.
He was born on July 25, 1922 in Jena, Germany, to American parents.
After earning a bachelor’s degree in mathematics from Yale University, Goodenough earned a master’s degree and doctorate in physics from the University of Chicago. He became a researcher and team leader at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and later headed the Inorganic Chemistry Laboratory at the University of Oxford.
