John B. Goodenough gweipwu2021-11-09 18:14:27

John B. Goodenough

At age 97, alum and pioneering inventor of the lithium-ion battery to receive Nobel Prize

John B. Goodenough can still remember, word for word, what a University of Chicago professor told him when he arrived on campus following World War II: “I don’t understand you veterans,” said John A. Simpson, a new UChicago instructor who had just helped achieve the first nuclear reaction. “Don’t you know that anyone who has ever done anything significant in physics had already done it by the time he was your age—and you want to begin?”

Three-quarters of a century later, at age 97, Goodenough will become the oldest person to receive the Nobel Prize in Chemistry. At a Dec. 10 ceremony in Sweden, he will be honored for pioneering breakthroughs that led to the widespread use of the lithium-ion battery—and helping spark the wireless revolution. The descendants of his batteries now power modern smartphones and hold the potential to one day sustainably harvest solar and wind power.

Goodenough, SM’50, PhD’52, will become the 92nd scholar associated with the University of Chicago to receive a Nobel Prize (joining several of his professors, including Enrico Fermi). Now at the University of Texas at Austin, Goodenough still works every day at his laboratory, researching new types of batteries. “I have learned to be open to surprises,” he told The University of Chicago Magazine in 2016, and to “not have preconceived ideas or close your mind from listening to what might work.”