M. Stanley Whittingham

Sir Michael Stanley Whittingham (born 22 December 1941) is a British-American chemist. He is a professor of chemistry and director of both the Institute for Materials Research and the Materials Science and Engineering program at Binghamton University, State University of New York. He also serves as director of the Northeastern Center for Chemical Energy Storage (NECCES) of the U.S. Department of Energy at Binghamton. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 2019 alongside Akira Yoshino and John B. Goodenough.

Education and career Whittingham was born in the Carlton suburb of Nottingham, England, on 22 December 1941. His father was a civil engineer, the first in the family to go to college. His mother Dorothy Mary (née Findley) was a chemist before marriage. He was educated at Stamford School from 1951 to 1960, before going up to New College, Oxford to read chemistry. At the University of Oxford, he took his BA (1964), MA (1967), and DPhil (1968). After completing his graduate studies, Whittingham became a postdoctoral fellow at Stanford University. He worked 16 years for Exxon Research & Engineering Company and is a director of the Northeastern Center for Chemical Energy Storage (NECCES), a U.S. Department of Energy Energy Frontier Research Center (EFRC) at Binghamton. In 2014, NECCES was awarded $12.8 million, from the U.S. Department of Energy to help accelerate scientific breakthroughs needed to build the 21st-century economy. In 2018, NECCES was granted another $3 million by the Department of Energy to continue its research on batteries. The NECCES team is using the funding to improve energy-storage materials and to develop new materials that are "cheaper, environmentally friendly, and able to store more energy than current materials can".

Research Whittingham and his boss, Fred Gamble, PhD, conceived the intercalation electrode. Exxon manufactured Whittingham's lithium-ion battery in the 1970s, based on a titanium disulfide cathode and a lithium-aluminum anode.

Lithium batteries have limited capacity because less than one lithium-ion/electron is reversibly intercalated per transition metal redox center. To achieve higher energy densities, one approach is to go beyond the one-electron redox intercalation reactions. Whittingham's research has advanced to multi-electron intercalation reactions, which can increase the storage capacity by intercalating multiple lithium ions. A few multi-electron intercalation materials have been successfully developed by Whittingham, like LiVOPO4/VOPO4. The multivalent vanadium cation (V3+<->V5+) plays an important role to accomplish the multi-electron reactions. These promising materials shine lights on the battery industry to increase energy density rapidly.

Whittingham received the Young Author Award from The Electrochemical Society in 1971, the Battery Research Award in 2003, and was elected a Fellow in 2004. In 2010, he was listed as one of the Top 40 innovators for contributions to advancing green technology by Greentech Media. In 2012, Whittingham received the IBA Yeager Award for Lifetime Contribution to Lithium Battery Materials Research, and he was elected a Fellow of Materials Research Society in 2013. He was listed along with John B. Goodenough, for pioneering research leading to the development of the lithium-ion battery on a list of Clarivate Citation Laureates for the Nobel Prize in Chemistry by Thomson Reuters in 2015. In 2018, Whittingham was elected to the National Academy of Engineering, "for pioneering the application of intercalation chemistry for energy storage materials."

In 2019, Whittingham, along with John B. Goodenough and Akira Yoshino, was awarded the 2019 Nobel Prize in Chemistry "for the development of lithium-ion batteries."

Personal life Stanley is married to Dr. Georgina Whittingham, a professor of Spanish at the State University of New York at Oswego. He has two children, Michael Whittingham and Jenniffer Whittingham-Bras.

Recognition 2007 Chancellor's Award for Excellence in Scholarship and Creative Activities, and Outstanding Research Award, State University of New York 2010 Award for Lifetime Contributions from the American Chemical Society 2018 Turnbull Award from the Materials Research Society 2018 Member National Academy of Engineering 2019 Nobel Prize in Chemistry with John B. Goodenough and Akira Yoshino 2023 VinFuture Grand Prize with Martin Green, Rachid Yazami and Akira Yoshino 2024 Knighted in the 2024 King's Birthday Honours "for services to chemistry".

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