Yoshino Akira

Yoshino Akira, (born January 30, 1948, Suita, Japan), Japanese chemist who won the 2019 Nobel Prize for Chemistry for his work in developing lithium-ion batteries. He shared the prize with American physicist John B. Goodenough and British-born American chemist M. Stanley Whittingham.

Yoshino received bachelor’s (1970) and master’s degrees (1972) in petrochemistry from Kyoto University. He then went to work at the chemical company Asahi Chemical (now Asahi Kasei Corporation).

Japanese electronic companies required rechargeable lightweight batteries for their devices. Yoshino improved on Goodenough’s lithium-ion battery, which had an anode of metallic lithium and a cathode of cobalt oxide with lithium ions intercalated (that is, inserted) between its layers. To avoid using metallic lithium at the anode, Yoshino and his collaborators made an anode of petroleum coke, which is a carbon-rich byproduct of oil refining. Charging the coke with electrons draws lithium ions into the anode. With the lithium ions intercalated in both the anode and the cathode, the lithium-ion battery has a long lifetime, because it is not a battery in which chemical reactions occur that slowly change the anode and cathode. Yoshino filed a patent on the battery in 1985, and the first lithium-ion battery was released commercially by Sony Corporation in 1991.

In 2005 Yoshino received a doctorate in engineering from Ōsaka University. He became president of the Lithium Ion Battery Technology and Evaluation Center in 2010. He also held positions as a professor at Meijo University, a visiting professor at Kyushu University, and an honorary fellow at Asahi Kasei. He won the Charles Stark Draper Prize in 2014.