Running with Lithium-Empowering the Earth: A Personal Journey

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.