Running with Lithium-Empowering the Earth: A Personal Journey - Paperback

by Michael Thackeray (Author)

In answer to the call for electric vehicles to counter the oil embargo and crisis in the Middle East during the mid-1970s, researchers at the Council for Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR) in South Africa initiated a twenty-year research programme that led to the discoveries of a novel, rechargeable, high-temperature sodium battery and new materials for ambient-temperature lithium batteries. The latter research laid the foundation for advances in lithium-ion technology that now commands a multibillion-dollar industry.

Running with Lithium--Empowering the Earth follows the path of science from materials' discovery to commercial use and the protection of intellectual property. Author Michael Thackeray shares his memoir and a story about decision-making and the consequences of choice on the course of a life in a highly competitive world while encountering big changes, experiences, and remarkable coincidences along the way.

Running with Lithium--Empowering the Earth emphasizes the need for clean energy and a rapid redirection of human ingenuity to undo the ecological damage that has been inflicted on earth since the Industrial Revolution some two hundred years ago. Follow Michael's journey and be inspired to engage in a scientific career--at a time when the world's growing number of inhabitants have an increasingly unequal share of its resources and in which life and survival are being challenged by an urgent need for clean energy and an electrification of the planet.

Author Biography

Michael Thackeray was born in South Africa in 1949. He received his PhD from the University of Cape Town in 1977. After twenty years at the Council for Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR) in Pretoria, interspersed with visits to the Inorganic Chemistry Laboratory at Oxford University, he emigrated to the United States in 1994 to accept a position at Argonne National Laboratory outside Chicago, where he was a distinguished fellow and senior scientist prior to his retirement as Argonne emeritus scientist in 2019. During his forty-five-year career, Thackeray's dominant research focus has been the design and characterisation of battery materials, patenting new systems and taking them from a research curiosity to practical reality in industry. He is the recipient of several South African and international awards for his contributions to lithium-ion battery science and technology.