Whittingham, Michael Stanley, 1941–, British-American chemist, Ph.D. Oxford, 1968. Whittingham worked for Exxon Research & Engineering from 1972 to 1984, then joined Schlumberger Ltd. In 1988, he became a professor at the Univ. of Binghamton in New York. Whittingham was awarded the 2019 Nobel Prize in Chemistry with John Goodenough and Akira Yoshino for their work to develop and advance lithium-ion batteries, a lightweight, rechargeable, and now-ubiquitous technology. In the early 1970s, Whittingham discovered that titanium disulfide, which had not previously been used in batteries, had a molecular structure that allowed lithium ions to enter into little pockets, resulting in the first functional lithium battery, which used titanium disulfide as the cathode and lithium as the anode.
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