(Michael) Stanley Whittingham was born in Nottingham, England, in 1941. The longtime Society member and ECS Fellow won the 2019 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for his research in developing lithium ion batteries. He shared the prize with John Goodenough and Akira Yoshino.
At the University of Oxford, Whittingham completed a BA in Chemistry (1964), and MA (1967) and PhD (1968) in Solid State Chemistry. He came to the U.S. in 1968 to pursue a postgraduate fellowship at Stanford University. In 1972, Whittingham was employed by the Exxon Research and Development Company where he studied titanium disulfide and its superconductive properties. Using intercalation, he created the first rechargeable lithium ion battery in 1976. Whittingham joined Schlumberger-Doll Research as Director of Physical Sciences in 1984, and became a faculty member at Binghamton University in 1988. Today, Whittingham is Distinguished Professor of Chemistry and Materials Sciences and Engineering at Binghamton and Director of the NorthEast Center for Chemical Energy Storage, a Department of Energy Frontier Research Center. In 2021, he went on the steering committee of the University of Maryland Center for Research in Extreme Batteries.
Whittingham became an ECS member in 1970 and has been active with the Society ever since, including chairing the ECS New York Section in 1980. He has been involved with more than 50 presentations at ECS biannual meetings. After receiving the Society’s 1971 Norman Hackerman Young Author Award and 2002 Battery Division Research Award, he was elected ECS Fellow in 2004 and awarded Society Honorary Membership in 2020. In a 2015 ECS interview, Whittingham provides an enlightening overview of the process leading to the commercialization of the first rechargeable lithium ion battery. From 1971 through the present, Whittingham has published regularly in the Journal of the Electrochemical Society (JES) and also contributed to Electrochemical and Solid-State Letters.
The Society celebrated Whittingham’s Nobel Prize in print and at a biannual meeting. The Interface winter 2019 issue highlights the 2019 Nobel Prize laureates’ achievements. Whittingham and fellow Nobel laureate Akira Yoshino were honored in a special session of the ECS PRiME 2020 meeting, Legends of Battery Science. A JES focus issue, Future of Intercalation Chemistry for Energy Storage and Conversion: In Honor of M. Stanley Whittingham, was published in connection with the symposium at that meeting. 2019 Nobel Laureates in Chemistry lists all of his ECS publications through 2019.
Throughout his career, Whittingham garnered many important awards. In 2021, he was elected Fellow of the Royal Society. Whittingham was named to the Carnegie Corporation of New York’s 2020 list of “Great Immigrants, Great Americans.” Additional honors include: in 2018, Member of the National Academy of Engineering and Materials Research Society Turnbull Award; 2017 International Society for Solid State Ionics Senior Scientist Award; 2015 Thomson Reuters Citation Laureate; 2010 American Chemical Society Award for Lifetime Contributions; and 2007 Chancellor’s Award for Excellence in Scholarship and Creative Activities, and Outstanding Research Award, State University of New York.
With John Goodenough, Whittingham published Solid State Chemistry of Energy Conversion and Storage in 1977. Additional important books include Materials Science in Energy Technology (with G. G. Libowitz, 1979) and Intercalation Chemistry (with A. J. Jacobson, 1984). Whittingham founded the journal Solid State Ionics in 1981 and served as its editor for 20 years. He holds 16 patents.
