John B. Goodenough

John B. Goodenough
John Bannister Goodenough (July 25, 1922 – June 25, 2023) was an American materials scientist, a solid-state physicist, and a Nobel laureate in chemistry. From 1996 he was a professor of Mechanical, Materials Science, and Electrical Engineering at the University of Texas at Austin. He is credited with
identifying the Goodenough–Kanamori rules of the sign of the magnetic superexchange in materials, with developing materials for computer random-access memory and with inventing cathode materials for lithium-ion batteries.
Goodenough was born in Jena, German Reich (Weimar Republic), to American parents. During and after graduating from Yale University, Goodenough served as a U.S. military meteorologist in World War II. He went on to obtain his Ph.D. in physics at the University of Chicago, became a researcher at MIT Lincoln Laboratory, and later the head of the Inorganic Chemistry Laboratory at the University of Oxford.
Goodenough was awarded the National Medal of Science, the Copley Medal, the Fermi Award, the Draper Prize, and the Japan Prize. The John B. Goodenough Award in materials science is named for him. In 2019, he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry alongside M. Stanley Whittingham and Akira Yoshino, and, at 97 years old, became the oldest Nobel laureate in history. From August 27, 2021, until his death, he was the oldest living Nobel Prize laureate.
Personal life and education
John Goodenough was born in Jena, Germany, on July 25, 1922, to American parents, Erwin Ramsdell Goodenough (1893–1965) and Helen Miriam (Lewis) Goodenough. His father was working on his Ph.D. at the Harvard Divinity School at the time of John's birth and later became a professor in the history of religion at Yale University. John's brother, the late Ward Goodenough, was a University of Pennsylvania anthropologist. The brothers attended boarding school at Groton in Massachusetts. John Goodenough suffered from dyslexia, when it was poorly understood by the medical community and went untreated. He could not read at Groton and did not do well in his classes. Instead he found interest in exploring Nature, plants and animals.
John also had two half-siblings from his father's second marriage, Ursula Goodenough, who is an emeritus professor of biology at Washington University in St. Louis, and Daniel A. Goodenough, emeritus professor of biology at Harvard Medical School. In 1944, John Goodenough received a BS in mathematics, summa cum laude from Yale University, where he was a member of Skull and Bones.
After serving in the U.S. Army as a meteorologist in World War II, Goodenough went to the University of Chicago to complete a master's degree and was awarded a Ph.D. in physics in 1952. His doctoral supervisor was Clarence Zener, a theorist in electrical breakdown, and he worked and studied with physicists, including Enrico Fermi and John A. Simpson. While at Chicago, he met Canadian history graduate student Irene Wiseman. They married in 1951. The couple had no children. Irene died in 2016. He was a Protestant Christian.
Goodenough turned 100 on July 25, 2022. He died at an assisted living facility in Austin, Texas, on June 25, 2023, one month shy of what would have been his 101st birthday.
Career and research
MIT Lincoln Laboratory
After his studies, Goodenough was a research scientist and team leader at MIT's Lincoln Laboratory for 24 years. During this time he was part of an interdisciplinary team responsible for developing random access magnetic memory. His research efforts on RAM led him to develop the concepts of cooperative orbital ordering, also known as a cooperative Jahn–Teller distortion, in oxide materials, and subsequently led to his developing the rules for the sign of the magnetic superexchange in materials, now known as the Goodenough–Kanamori rules (with Junjiro Kanamori).
Tenure at the University of Oxford
During the late 1970s and early 1980s, he continued his career as head of the Inorganic Chemistry Laboratory at University of Oxford. Among the highlights of his work at Oxford, Goodenough is credited with significant research essential to the development of commercial lithium-ion rechargeable batteries. Goodenough was able to expand upon previous work from M. Stanley Whittingham on battery materials, and found in 1980 that by using LixCoO2 as a lightweight, high energy density cathode material, he could double the capacity of lithium-ion batteries.
Although Goodenough saw a commercial potential of batteries with his LiCoO2 and LiNiO2 cathodes and approached Oxford University with a request to patent this invention, Oxford refused. Unable to afford the patenting expenses with his academic salary, Goodenough turned to UK's Atomic Energy Research Establishment in Harwell, which accepted his offer, but under the terms, which provided zero royalty payment to the inventors John B. Goodenough and Koichi Mizushima. In 1990, the AERE licensed Goodenough's patents to Sony Corporation, which was followed by other battery manufacturers. It was estimated, that the AERE made over 10 mln. British pounds from this licensing.
The work at Sony on further improvements to Goodenough's invention was led by Akira Yoshino, who had developed a scaled up design of the battery and manufacturing process. Goodenough received the Japan Prize in 2001 for his discoveries of the materials critical to the development of lightweight high energy density rechargeable lithium batteries, and he, Whittingham, and Yoshino shared the 2019 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for their research in lithium-ion batteries.
Professor at University of Texas
From 1986, Goodenough was a professor at The University of Texas at Austin in the Cockrell School of Engineering departments of Mechanical Engineering and Electrical Engineering. During his tenure there, he continued his research on ionic conducting solids and electrochemical devices; he stated that he continued to study improved materials for batteries to help promote the development of electric vehicles and help to reduce human dependency on fossil fuels. Arumugam Manthiram and Goodenough discovered the polyanion class of cathodes. They showed that positive electrodes containing polyanions, e.g., sulfates, produce higher voltages than oxides due to the inductive effect of the polyanion. The polyanion class includes materials such as lithium-iron phosphates that are used for smaller devices like power tools. His group also identified various promising electrode and electrolyte materials for solid oxide fuel cells. He held the Virginia H. Cockrell Centennial Chair in Engineering.
Goodenough still worked at the university at age 98 as of 2021, hoping to find another breakthrough in battery technology.
On February 28, 2017, Goodenough and his team at the University of Texas published a paper in the journal Energy and Environmental Science on their demonstration of a glass battery, a low-cost all-solid-state battery that is noncombustible and has a long cycle life with a high volumetric energy density, and fast rates of charge and discharge. Instead of liquid electrolytes, the battery uses glass electrolytes that enable the use of an alkali-metal anode without the formation of dendrites. However, this paper was met with widespread skepticism by the battery research community and remains controversial after several follow-up works. The work was criticized for a lack of comprehensive data, spurious interpretations of the data obtained, and that the proposed mechanism of battery operation would violate the first law of thermodynamics.
In April 2020, a patent was filed for the glass battery on behalf of Portugal's National Laboratory of Energy and Geology (LNEG), the University of Porto, Portugal, and the University of Texas.
Advisory work
In 2010, Goodenough joined the technical advisory board of Enevate, a silicon-dominant Li-ion battery technology startup based in Irvine, California. Goodenough also served as an adviser to the Joint Center for Energy Storage Research (JCESR), a collaboration led by Argonne National Laboratory and funded by the Department of Energy. From 2016, Goodenough also worked as an adviser for Battery500, a national consortium led by Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL) and partially funded by the U.S. Department of Energy.
Fundamental investigations
On the fundamental side, Goodenough‘s research focused on magnetism and on the metal–insulator transition behavior in transition-metal oxides. Along with Junjiro Kanamori, Goodenough developed a set of semi-empirical rules to predict magnetism in these materials in the 1950s and 1960s, now called the Goodenough–Kanamori rules, forming the basis of superexchange, which is a core property for high-temperature superconductivity.
Distinctions
Professor Goodenough was elected a member of the National Academy of Engineering in 1976 for his work designing materials for electronic components and clarifying the relationships between the properties, structures, and chemistry of substances. He was also a member of the National Academy of Sciences, French Academy of Sciences, the Spanish Royal Academy of Sciences, and the National Academy of Sciences, India. He authored more than 550 articles, 85 book chapters and reviews, and five books, including two seminal works, Magnetism and the Chemical Bond (1963) and Les oxydes des metaux de transition (1973). Goodenough was a co-recipient of the 2009 Enrico Fermi Award for his work in lithium-ion batteries, alongside Siegfried S. Hecker of Stanford University who received the award for his work in plutonium metallurgy.
In 2010, he was elected a Foreign Member of the Royal Society. On February 1, 2013, Goodenough was presented with the National Medal of Science by President Barack Obama of the United States. He was awarded the Draper Prize in engineering. In 2015 he was listed along with M Stanley Whittingham, for pioneering research leading to the development of the lithium-ion battery on a list of Clarivate Citation Laureates for the Nobel Prize in Chemistry by Thomson Reuters. In 2017 he received the Welch Award in Chemistry and in 2019 he was awarded the Copley Medal of the Royal Society.
The Royal Society of Chemistry granted a John B. Goodenough Award in his honor.
Goodenough received an honorary C.K. Prahalad award from Corporate EcoForum (CEF) in 2017. CEF's founder Rangaswami commented, "John Goodenough is evidence of imagination being put to work for the greater good. We're thrilled to recognize his lifetime of achievements and are hopeful that his latest discovery will have major implications for the future of sustainable battery storage."
Goodenough was awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry on October 9, 2019, for his work on lithium-ion batteries, along with M. Stanley Whittingham and Akira Yoshino. To date he is the oldest person ever to have been awarded the Nobel Prize.
Works
Articles
Lightfoot, P.; Pei, S. Y.; Jorgensen, J. D.; Manthiram, A.; Tang, X. X. & J. B. Goodenough. "Excess Oxygen Defects in Layered Cuprates", Argonne National Laboratory, The University of Texas-Austin, Materials Science Laboratory United States Department of Energy, National Science Foundation, (September 1990).
Argyriou, D. N.; Mitchell, J. F.; Chmaissem, O.; Short, S.; Jorgensen, J. D. & J. B. Goodenough. "Sign Reversal of the Mn-O Bond Compressibility in La1.2Sr1.8Mn2O7 Below TC: Exchange Striction in the Ferromagnetic State", Argonne National Laboratory, The University of Texas-Austin, Center for Material Science and Engineering United States Department of Energy, National Science Foundation, Welch Foundation, (March 1997).
Goodenough, J. B.; Abruna, H. D. & M. V. Buchanan. "Basic Research Needs for Electrical Energy Storage. Report of the Basic Energy Sciences Workshop on Electrical Energy Storage, April 2–4, 2007", United States Department of Energy, (April 4, 2007).
Books
See also
Junjiro Kanamori
Koichi Mizushima (scientist)
Rachid Yazami
References
Further reading
External links
Faculty Directory at University of Texas at Austin
Array of Contemporary American Physicists
History of the lithium-ion battery, Physics Today, Sept. 2016
by The Electrochemical Society, October 5, 2016
Are Solid State Batteries about to change the world?, Joe Scott, November 2018, Goodenough and team research on more energy dense solid state Li-ion chemistry featured 3:35–12:45.
Pr John Goodenough's interview GOODENOUGH John B., 2001–05 – Sciences : histoire orale on École supérieure de physique et de chimie industrielles de la ville de Paris history of science website
including the Nobel Lecture, "Designing Lithium-ion Battery Cathodes" (December 8, 2019)
1922 births
2023 deaths
20th-century American physicists
21st-century American physicists
American centenarians
American Christians
American inventors
American materials scientists
American Nobel laureates
Draper Prize winners
Enrico Fermi Award recipients
Fellows of the American Physical Society
Foreign Members of the Royal Society
Groton School alumni
Massachusetts Institute of Technology faculty
Members of the French Academy of Sciences
Members of the United States National Academy of Engineering
Members of the United States National Academy of Sciences
Men centenarians
National Medal of Science laureates
Nobel laureates in Chemistry
Recipients of the Copley Medal
Scientists with dyslexia
Skull and Bones Society
Solid state chemists
United States Army personnel of World War II
University of Chicago alumni
University of Texas at Austin faculty
Yale University alumni
Members of Skull and Bones
Benjamin Franklin Medal (Franklin Institute) laureates