John Bannister Goodenough is an American professor and prominent solid-state physicist. He is currently a professor of mechanical engineering and materials science at the University of Texas at Austin. He is widely credited for the identification and development of the Li-ion rechargeable battery as well as for developing the Goodenough-Kanamori rules for determining the sign of the magnetic super exchange in materials. In 2014 he received the Charles Stark Draper Prize for his contributions to the lithium-ion battery. John was born on 25 July 1922 in Jena, Germany.

Goodenough attended boarding school at Groton School before receiving a B.S. in Mathematics, summa cum laude, from Yale University in 1944. He completed a Ph.D. in Physics under the supervision of Clarence Zener at the University of Chicago in 1952. He received the National Medal Of Science in 2011.