“Where do you see yourself in five years?”
I suspect that most of us don’t have a ready answer, but here’s an even harder question:
“Where do you see yourself at the age of 94?”
If you’re Dr. John B. Goodenough, the answer is that you’ll still be working to develop new and improved battery technology.
Dr. John B. Goodenough
Goodenough graduated summa cum laude from Yale in 1944 with a B.S. in mathematics. After serving overseas in the Second World War, he completed his Ph.D. in physics at the University of Chicago in 1952.
While working at MIT’s Lincoln Laboratory, he was part of the team which developed random access memory (RAM) and subsequently discovered the principles for superexchange interactions in magnetic materials—what is now known as the Goodenough-Kanamori rule.
As the head of the inorganic chemistry lab at the University of Oxford, Dr. Goodenough was instrumental in the development of LixCoO2 as the cathode material of choice for the Li-ion rechargeable battery. He received the Charles Stark Draper Prize for this work in 2014.
He has been a professor in the departments of mechanical and electrical engineering at the University of Texas at Austin since 1986, where he has continued his research on ionic conducting solids and electrochemical devices.
3 Questions
ENGINEERING.com had the opportunity to pose a few questions to Dr. Goodenough, who was kind enough to share his unique perspective on modern technology.
You worked on the development of both random access magnetic memory and li-ion rechargeable batteries. Which would you say made the biggest impact on technology today?
The RAM concept enabled a realization of the large-scale digital computer. The transition from vacuum tubes to transistors, and from the magnetic memory element to a more compact memory element, has allowed miniaturization of the components in the microelectronic revolution.
Are we reaching the limits of battery energy density, or do you expect that advances in physics and materials will lead to a new generation of batteries?
The Li-ion battery together with the microelectronic digital computer continues to transform modern society. Batteries soon to be marketed should enable a similar transformation of our energy economy to one much less dependent on fossil fuels.
What drives you to continue working at age 94?
What keeps me going at 94? The joy of discovery and collaboration as well as the need to wean modern society from its dependence on fossil fuels.
Who are your engineering role models? Share your thoughts in the comments below.