Goodenough, John Bannister, 1922–2023, American physicist, b. Jena, Germany, Ph.D. Univ. of Chicago, 1952. Goodenough was a researcher at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology from 1952 to 1976, when he became a professor at Oxford. He has been on the faculty at the Univ. of Texas, Austin, since 1986. Goodenough was jointly awarded the 2019 Nobel Prize in Chemistry with Stanley Whittingham and Akira Yoshino for their work to develop and advance lithium-ion batteries. In 1979, Goodenough showed that the use of cobalt oxide as the cathode of a lithium-ion battery enabled a high density of energy to be stored. This discovery paved the way for development of modern lithium-ion batteries, which are used in cellular telephones, computer tablets and laptops, life-saving medical devices, and other portable electronic devices as well as electric vehicles.
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