Akira Yoshino

Akira Yoshino is one of the most consequential inventors of the modern era — the Japanese chemist whose 1985 breakthrough gave the world its first commercially viable lithium-ion battery, and whose work now underpins virtually every rechargeable device on the planet, from smartphones and laptops to electric vehicles and grid-scale energy storage. Born in Suita, Japan, Yoshino earned his bachelor’s and master’s degrees in petrochemistry from Kyoto University before joining Asahi Kasei Corporation in 1972, where he would spend his entire industrial career. He received his doctorate in engineering from Osaka University in 2005 and has been a professor at Meijo University in Nagoya since 2017. He holds the title of Honorary Fellow at Asahi Kasei and serves as President of the Lithium Ion Battery Technology and Evaluation Center (LIBTEC), where he leads research into next-generation battery systems, including all-solid-state batteries for electric vehicles.

Science speaker Akira Yoshino’s defining invention came from a moment of serendipity and scientific intuition: in 1982, while searching for the right anode material, he encountered a paper by American chemist John Goodenough describing lithium cobalt oxide as a promising cathode. Combining that cathode with a carbon-based anode, Yoshino fabricated a prototype that was both stable and rechargeable — a configuration he patented in 1985. Sony commercialized the technology in 1991, and within a decade the lithium-ion battery had become the defining energy storage technology of the consumer electronics age. In the years that followed, Yoshino contributed further critical innovations: the aluminum foil current collector that enabled high cell voltage at low cost, the functional separator that halted thermal runaway, and the manufacturing techniques that made mass production possible.

The 2019 Nobel Prize and the Road to Net Zero

In 2019, the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences awarded Yoshino the Nobel Prize in Chemistry, jointly with John B. Goodenough and M. Stanley Whittingham, for the development of lithium-ion batteries. The prize recognized not just a technical achievement, but a technology that had quietly rewired modern civilization. Beyond consumer electronics, Yoshino has long argued that the lithium-ion battery’s greatest contribution lies ahead: enabling the large-scale integration of renewable energy and accelerating the transition to electric mobility. He wears two pins on his lapel — one bearing the name of Asahi Kasei, his lifelong employer, and one displaying the United Nations’ 17 Sustainable Development Goals, a quiet signal of where he believes the technology must go.

His accolades span decades: the IEEE Medal for Environmental and Safety Technologies (2012), the Global Energy Prize (2013), the European Inventor Award (2014), the Charles Stark Draper Prize (2014), and the Japan Prize (2018), among others. He continues to lecture internationally — most recently delivering a Distinguished Lecture at the University of Toronto on the future society made possible by lithium-ion batteries — and remains one of the most authoritative voices on energy storage, electrification, and sustainability in the world.

As a speaker, Akira Yoshino brings the depth of a Nobel laureate and the clarity of an engineer who built his discovery with his own hands. His keynotes connect the origin story of the lithium-ion battery to the defining challenges of the energy transition — decarbonization, EV adoption, grid resilience, and the emergence of solid-state batteries — in a way that is rigorous, accessible, and genuinely forward-looking. For organizations working in energy, mobility, sustainability, or deep technology, booking Yoshino means access to the scientist who literally powered the world in which we live.