Michael Makepeace Thackeray FRS (born in 1949) is a South African chemist and battery materials researcher.
In the mid-1980s he co-discovered the manganese oxide spinel family of cathodes for lithium ion batteries while working in the lab of John Goodenough at the University of Oxford.
[1] In 1998, while at Argonne National Laboratory, he led a team that first reported the NMC cathode technology.
[2][3] Patent protection around the concept and materials were first issued in 2005 to Argonne National Laboratory to a team with Thackeray, Khalil Amine, Jaekook Kim, and Christopher Johnson.
In 1983 Thackeray returned to CSIR as Group Leader of the Ceramics Division and in 1988 was named a Research Manager in the Battery Technology Unit.