John Bannister Goodenough (/ˈɡʊdɪnʌf/ GUUD-in-uf; July 25, 1922 – June 25, 2023) was an American materials scientist, a solid-state physicist, and a Nobel laureate in chemistry.

His father, a graduate student at Oxford when John was born, eventually became a professor of religious history at Yale.

[16] He completed his coursework in early 1943 (after just two and a half years) and received his degree in 1944,[17] covering his expenses by tutoring and grading exams.

[16] He had initially sought to enlist in the military following the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, but his mathematics professor convinced him to stay at Yale for another year so that he could finish his coursework, which qualified him to join the U.S. Army Air Corps' meteorology department.

[11][16] After World War II ended, Goodenough obtained a master's degree and a Ph.D. in physics from the University of Chicago, the latter in 1952.

[11][18] His doctoral supervisor was Clarence Zener, a theorist in electrical breakdown; he also worked and studied with physicists, including Enrico Fermi and John A. Simpson.

[28][29][30] The U.S. government eventually terminated Goodenough's research funding, so during the late 1970s and early 1980s, he left the United States and continued his career as head of the Inorganic Chemistry Laboratory at the University of Oxford.

[27] Among the highlights of his work at Oxford, Goodenough is credited with significant research essential to the development of commercial lithium-ion rechargeable batteries.

Although Goodenough saw a commercial potential of batteries with his LiCoO2 and LiNiO2 cathodes and approached the University of Oxford with a request to patent this invention, it refused.

[citation needed] The work at Sony on further improvements to Goodenough's invention was led by Akira Yoshino, who had developed a scaled up design of the battery and manufacturing process.

[41][42] On February 28, 2017, Goodenough and his team at the University of Texas published a paper in the journal Energy and Environmental Science on their demonstration of a glass battery, a low-cost all-solid-state battery that is noncombustible and has a long cycle life with a high volumetric energy density, and fast rates of charge and discharge.

[43][42][44] However, this paper was met with widespread skepticism by the battery research community and remains controversial after several follow-up works.

[47] In 2010, Goodenough joined the technical advisory board of Enevate, a silicon-dominant Li-ion battery technology startup based in Irvine, California.

[50][51] Goodenough was elected a member of the National Academy of Engineering in 1976 for his work designing materials for electronic components and clarifying the relationships between the properties, structures, and chemistry of substances.