Donald Robert Sadoway (born 7 March 1950) is professor emeritus of materials chemistry at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

He is a noted expert on batteries and has done significant research on how to improve the performance and longevity of portable power sources.

[2] In parallel, he is an expert on the extraction of metals from their ores and the inventor of molten oxide electrolysis, which has the potential to produce crude steel without the use of carbon reductant thereby totally eliminating greenhouse gas emissions.

When powered exclusively by renewable electricity, this technique has the potential to eliminate the carbon dioxide emissions that are generated through traditional methods.

[14] In 2010, with funding from Bill Gates[15] and Total, Sadoway and two others, David Bradwell and Luis Ortiz,[13] co-founded a company called the Liquid Metal Battery Corporation (later, Ambri) in order to scale up and commercialize the technology.

Examples include automotive exhaust catalytic converters (technology), forensic examination of paintings (chemistry in the fine arts), the mistreatment of Rosalind Franklin in the quest to discover the structure of DNA (intellectual dishonesty), the metallurgical failure that sank the Titanic (greed and incompetence), and the clarification of champagne (viticulture).

On 29 February 2012, Sadoway gave a TED talk on his invention of the liquid metal battery for grid-scale storage.

[21] Sadoway was named one of Time magazine's 100 Most Influential People in the World in 2012 for accomplishments in energy storage as well as his approach to mentoring students (hire the novice instead of the expert).