Donald Sadoway is a professor of materials science and engineering at MIT where he teaches the most popular freshman course that is offered. His accomplishments include inventing the liquid metal battery for large-scale stationary storage and molten oxide electrolysis for carbon-free metals production. He is the founder of four companies, Ambri, Boston Metal, Avanti Battery, and Sadoway Labs. His TED Talk is animated and inspiring - and with 2.4 million views it is as much about inventing inventors as it is about inventing technology.

Professor Sadoway's mission to improve the environment, the success of his lab, the propensity to create spinout companies that commercialize his inventions, and most importantly the way he mentors grad-students and post-docs in his labs to ultimately be future technology leaders. We talk about thinking from first principles, knowing your limitations, thinking ahead of time about environmental impact of material inputs and the social considerations of extracting them, and much more. 

Check out his free series of lectures on MIT open courseware: Intro to Solid State Chemistry This is the course that Bill Gates loved to the point of wanting to meet Professor Sadoway which ultimately led to Bill Gates investing in Ambri, the liquid metal battery technology that Professor Sadoway invented. 

More about Donald

Donald R. Sadoway is the John F. Elliott Professor of Materials Chemistry in the Department of Materials Science and Engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. His B.A.Sc. in Engineering Science and Ph.D. in Chemical Metallurgy are from the University of Toronto. He joined the MIT faculty in 1978. The author of over 180 scientific papers and inventor on 35 U.S. patents, his research is directed towards batteries for grid-scale storage and towards environmentally sound metals extraction technologies. Online videos of his chemistry lectures hosted by MIT OpenCourseWare extend his impact on engineering education far beyond the lecture hall. In 2012 he was named by Time magazine as one of the 100 Most Influential People in the World.­­

Find Professor Sadoway on Twitter and LinkedIn and the website for Sadoway Labs. 

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