Stanley Whittingham
2010 Northeast Region Award for Achievements in the Chemical Sciences
Stan Whittingham is a professor of materials science and director of the Materials Science Program and Institute for Materials Research at the State University of New York at Binghamton. He received his BA and D Phil degrees in chemistry from Oxford University. In 1968, he joined the Materials Science Department at Stanford University as a postdoctoral research associate to study fast-ion transport in solids and in 1971 won the Young Author Award of the Electrochemical Society for his work on the solid electrolyte beta-alumina. In 1972, he joined Exxon Research and Engineering Company to initiate a program in alternative energy production and storage. He discovered there the role of intercalation in battery reactions, which resulted in the first commercial lithium rechargeable batteries.
After 16 years in industry, he joined the Binghamton campus of the State University of New York as a professor of chemistry to initiate an academic program in materials chemistry. His recent work focuses on the synthesis and characterization of novel microporous and nano-oxides and phosphates for possible electrochemical and sensor applications. He was principal editor of the Journal Solid State Ionics for 20 years. He won the Battery Research Award of the Electrochemical Society in 2002, and was elected a Fellow of the Electrochemical Society in 2004. In addition he was awarded a JSPS Fellowship in the Physics Department of the University of Tokyo. In 2007, he co-chaired the battery section of the US DOE Workshop on Energy Storage, and presented its recommendations at the National Meetings of the American Chemical Society and the Materials Research Society as well as in the April 2008 issue of the Materials Research Society Bulletin. The last is now being converted into a text book with Cambridge University Press.
Prof. Whittingham received his award at the awards banquet, as seen below.
