UT professor John Goodenough, world's oldest Nobel Prize recipient, dies at 100

The video above is from October 2019, when Goodenough was awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry.

AUSTIN (KXAN) — University of Texas professor John Goodenough, known as the inventor of the lithium-ion battery, has died at the age of 100, the university announced Monday.

"Goodenough was a dedicated public servant, a sought-after mentor and a brilliant yet humble inventor," a release from the university said.

In 2019, at the age of 97, Goodenough became the world's oldest Nobel Prize recipient, having won the prestigious award for chemistry for his battery work.

"My share of the Nobel prize will go to my University [of Texas at Austin] to support the people who work there," Goodenough said at the time. He shared the award with M. Stanley Whittingham of the State University of New York at Binghamton and Akira Yoshino of Meijo University in Japan.

"John’s legacy as a brilliant scientist is immeasurable — his discoveries improved the lives of billions of people around the world," said Jay Hartzell, president of UT Austin. "He was a leader at the cutting edge of scientific research throughout the many decades of his career, and he never ceased searching for innovative energy-storage solutions. John’s work and commitment to our mission are the ultimate reflection of our aspiration as Longhorns — that what starts here changes the world — and he will be greatly missed among our UT community."

Goodenough was a faculty member in UT's Cockrell School of Engineering for 37 years. The university said his research focused on battery materials and addressing engineering problems and fundamental solid-state science "to create the next generation of rechargeable batteries."

Goodenough was born in Germany in 1922, but grew up in the northeastern U.S. and attended school in Massachusetts. He worked for 24 years at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he laid the groundwork for the development of random-access memory (RAM) for the digital computer.

He later worked as a professor at the University of Oxford. As head of the Inorganic Chemistry Laboratory, he made his discovery of the lithium-ion battery.

In addition to the Nobel Prize, Goodenough was also the recipient of several other awards, including the National Medal of Science, the Japan Prize, the Charles Stark Draper Prize, the Benjamin Franklin Medal, the Enrico Fermi Award, the Robert A. Welch Award and the Copley Medal.

He frequently donated the monetary prizes to UT, "helping to support engineering graduate students and researchers," according to the release from the university.

Goodenough and his wife were married for more than 70 years until her death in 2016.