User:ASkonie96/John B. Goodenough

Personal Life
John B Goodenough was born in the year 1922 in the city of Jena, Germany. His parents, Erwin Ramsdell Goodenough and Helen Miriam Goodenough, were both American, but traveled throughout Germany and England as Goodenough's father was currently working on his DPhil at Oxford University. Goodenough had three siblings, Ward Goodenough, James Goodenough, and Hester Goodenough. Goodenough's father later divorced his wife and remarried another woman named Evelyn Pitcher Goodenough, and would have another child, Ursula Goodenough. His half-sister married John E. Heuser, and had five children. His older brother, Ward, also got married and had two daughters. Goodenough would later marry Irene Wiseman in June of 1951 but produced no children.

As a child, Goodenough's main interests were playing with his dog, Mack, and exploring the forest nearby his home.

Despite his success later in life, as a child, Goodenough struggled learning how to read and write. His family didn't acknowledge his dyslexia, and assumed that he was simply not smart enough to continue on into college.

Education & Employment
Goodenough attended a private boarding school called Groton, before being accepted into Yale in 1940. Goodenough worked plenty of minor jobs as a youth such as being a lifeguard, YMCA counselor, and a tutor to help pay for his Yale tuition. After graduating from Yale, he enlisted in the US army, where he would then serve as a meteorologist between 1943 to 1946. He then went to graduate school at the University of Chicago, where he earned his PhD in 1952. He was offered a position as a research scientist at MIT, which he took and continued to work there for decades before going to teach at Oxford University, and then the University of Texas. During his time at MIT, Congress passed a new bill that forced Goodenough to terminate his research on the copper oxide system, which he was studying in hopes of learning more about manganese oxides and superconductivity. His uncompleted findings would be opposed by the science field for a number of years. Later on in 1986, Georg Bednorz and Alex Mueller discovered a high temperature conductivity, that won them the Nobel Prize in Physics.

Contributions
While working at the University of Oxford, Goodenough contributed to the development of lithium-ion rechargeable batteries. This research would later pave the way for his Nobel Prize in 2019 for his research on lithium-ion batteries, along with M. Stanley Whittingham and Akira Yoshino. His work on lithium- ion batteries

Awards

 * Japan Prize in 2001
 * Enrico Fermi Award in 2011
 * National Medal of Science 2013
 * Nobel Prize in Chemistry 2019