John B Goodenough Award

The John B Goodenough Award is to recognise exceptional and sustained contributions to the area of materials chemistry.

Rules and Criteria

• Run biennially
• Open to scientists who have spent an appreciable part of their career working in the UK
• Candidates are NOT permitted to nominate themselves
• One page CV for the candidate which should include their date of birth, website URL, summary of education and career, a list of 5 relevant publications, total numbers of publications and patents. Greater weight will be placed on recent work
• A one page supporting statement addressing the selection criteria
• Award is Lifetime
• Nominations open 1 September 2014 
• Nominations close 15 January 2015
• Award winner will be chosen by the Materials Chemistry Division Awards Committee
• Award winner receives £2000, a medal and a certificate
  

About the award

The RSC John B Goodenough Award (previously advertised as the Materials Chemistry Forum Lifetime Award) was established in 2008.  

This award recognises the work of John Bannister Goodenough. He received a degree in Mathematics at Yale whilst serving in the USAAF. When a Group Leader at MIT Lincoln Laboratory, Goodenough formulated the concept of cooperative orbital ordering to remove a d-orbital degeneracy; the resulting crystallographic distortions are now known as cooperative Jahn-Teller distortions.

Goodenough also recognized that short-range orbital ordering built in chemical inhomogeneities that enabled the needed control of the magnetic B-H loop for the ferrospinel memory cores. He applied the concept of cooperative orbital order to account for the anistropic magnetic order in the system La1-xCaxMnO3, and his attendant formulation of the rules for the sign of the spin-spin interactions are now known as the Goodenough-Kanamori rules.

In the 1960s, his exploration of the transition from localized to itinerant d-electron behaviour not only resolved the origin of the metallic conductivity found in some perovskites, but also led to his recognition that this transition is first-order and is manifest in charge-density waves.

Termination by Congress of such fundamental studies at Lincoln Laboratory led Goodenough to explore energy materials as Professor and Head of the Inorganic Chemistry Laboratory, University of Oxford, where he developed layered and spinel oxides as cathodes for the Li rechargeable battery. His layered Li1-xCoO2 cathode was adopted by SONY of Japan to launch the cell telephone and laptop computer thus initiating the "wireless revolution".