Donald Sadoway

Donald Robert Sadoway is the current John F. Elliott Professor of Materials Chemistry at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. A faculty member in the Department of Materials Science Engineering, he is a noted expert on batteries and has done significant research on how to improve the performance and longevity of portable power sources.

Born March 7, 1950 in Toronto, Ontario, he did both his undergraduate and graduate studies at the University of Toronto, receiving his PhD in 1977. There he focused his studies on chemical metallurgy. In 1977 he received a NATO postdoctoral fellowship from the National Research Council of Canada and came to MIT to conduct his postdoctoral research under Julian Szekely. Sadoway joined the MIT faculty in 1978.

Professor Sadoway's research seeks to establish the scientific underpinnings for technologies that make efficient use of energy and natural resources in an environmentally sound manner. This spans engineering applications and the supportive fundamental science. The overarching theme of his work is electrochemistry in nonaqueous media.

In addition to his teaching responsibilities he also currently manages Group Sadoway: Extreme Electrochemistry, a research group consisting of about 30 people including postdoctoral associates, visiting scientists, technical staff, graduate students, and undergraduate students. Research interests of Group Sadoway include liquid metal batteries, metals production by molten oxide electrolysis, rechargeable solid polymer batteries, and aluminum-ion batteries. His current research sponsors include ARPA-E (Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy), the French energy company Total, S.A., the Office of Naval Research, and Weatherford.

He is a founder of the Liquid Metal Battery Corporation, an early-stage company that develops new battery technology for grid-scale electricity storage. LMBC funding comes from Bill Gates, Total, S.A., and Khosla Ventures.

On February 29, 2012, Sadoway delivered a TED talk on the topic of inventing the liquid metal battery. In April of 2012 he was named one of the 100 most influential people in the world by Time magazine.

The next year he was awarded an honorary Doctorate of Engineering by the University of Toronto in recognition of his contributions to sustainable energy. In 2014, he received an honorary doctorate from the Norwegian University of Science and Technology.