ECS is home to many Nobel laurates
ECS is proud to be the scientific home to many winners of the Nobel Prize, the most prestigious award presented to researchers.
John B. Goodenough, M. Stanley Whittingham, and Akira Yoshino shared the 2019 Nobel Prize in Chemistry.
All three Nobel Laureates have been deeply involved with The Electrochemical Society. Their extensive publications with ECS are collected in 2019 Nobel Laureates in Chemistry. Their articles trace the history of the development of the Lithium-ion battery, the revolutionary invention for which they shared the prize.
John B. Goodenough received the ECS Olin Palladium Award in 1999. He became a member in 2013 and was named an ECS Fellow—and life member—in 2016.
M. Stanley Whittingham became an ECS member in 1970. His exceptional research was noted when he received the ECS’s Young Author Award in 1971. In 2002, the Battery Division honored Whittingham with its Research Award. He became an ECS Fellow—and life member— in 2004.
Akira Yoshino received ECS’s Battery Division Technology Award in 1999. He became an ECS member in 2016.
Isamu Akasaki was an ECS member from 1985 until his death in 2021. He received the Society’s Gordon E. Moore Medal for Outstanding Achievement in Solid State Science and Technology and published multiple papers in the Society’s journal. In 2014, he was a co-recipient of the Nobel Prize in Physics with ECS members Hiroshi Amano and Shuji Nakamura for “the invention of efficient blue light-emitting diodes, which has enabled bright and energy-saving white light sources.” He shared the 2021 Queen Elizabeth Prize for Engineering with Shuji Nakamura, Nick Holonyak, Jr., M. George Craford, and Russell Dupuis for the development of LED lighting.
Other Nobel Prize laureates in the ECS community include:
- Jack Kilby (joint) in physics in 2000 “for the invention of the integrated circuit”
- Steven Chu (joint) in physics in 1997 with William D. Phillips “for the development of methods to cool and trap atoms with laser light”
- Richard Smalley in chemistry in 1996 “for discovery of fullerenes”
- Rudolph Marcus in chemistry in 1992 for his “contributions to the theory of electron transfer reactions in chemical systems”
- Jean-Marie Lehn (joint) in chemistry in 1987 “for the development and use of molecules with structure-specific interactions of high selectivity”
- Gerd Binnig (joint) in physics in 1986 “for the design of the scanning tunneling microscope”
- Irving Langmuir in chemistry in 1932 “for his discoveries and investigations in surface chemistry”
- Fritz Haber in chemistry in 1918 “for the synthesis of ammonia from its elements”
- Theodore William Richards in chemistry in 1914 for “his accurate determinations of the atomic weight of a large number of chemical elements”
