American solid-state physicist awarded the 2019 Nobel Prize in Chemistry at age 97, making him the oldest Nobel laureate in history. He shared the Nobel Prize “for the development of lithium ion batteries” with M. Stanley Whittingham and Akira Yoshino. Goodenough is widely credited for the identification and development of the lithium-ion battery, for developing the Goodenough–Kanamori rules in determining the sign of the magnetic superexchange in materials, and for seminal developments in computer random access memory.
Goodenough was born in Germany (then under the Weimar Republic) where his father, Erwin Ramsdell Goodenough, who was later to become a Yale University history professor, was studying. During and after graduating from Yale, Goodenough served as a military meteorologist in World War II. He went on to get 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. Since 1986, he has been a professor of mechanical engineering and materials science at the University of Texas at Austin.
He has 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).
He has been 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.
Link to Wikipedia biography