The 2022 CNRS gold medal, one of the most prestigious French scientific awards, was awarded to chemist Jean-Marie Tarascon on Thursday July 7. This battery specialist is the “pioneer of electrochemical energy storage”. His work, recognized worldwide, “are at the heart of the scientific challenges and environmental issues of today and tomorrow: allowing the storage of energy in compliance with the principles of eco-design, safety and recycling”CNRS CEO Antoine Petit said in a statement.
At 68, Jean-Marie Tarascon has worked for more than 25 years in laboratories associated with the CNRS and is now a professor at the Collège de France. He also leads the French network on energy RS2E which brings together industrial and academic players. His work aims in particular to improve the longevity of batteries and to replace materials whose extraction poses ethical and environmental problems – by replacing, for example, cobalt in cathodes with manganese.
The researcher began his career in the United States in the early 1980s. In 1989, the Loma Prieta earthquake in California relaunched research on batteries, because faced with the urgency of the situation, the autonomy of lead batteries turns out to be insufficient. Jean-Marie Tarascon then took over as head of the energy storage group and converted to electrochemistry. With his team, he explores the way “still in its infancy” lithium batteries and developed the first ultra-thin, more flexible and safer batteries, which today power certain electric cars.
Since his return to France in 1995, he notably headed the reactivity and solid chemistry laboratory in Amiens, and initiated the creation of the RS2E network. It was under his leadership that this network developed the sodium-ion battery, useful for storing renewable energies. This one “delivers slightly lower performance than Lithium-ion batteries”underlines the CNRS, but “it remains very interesting for the stationary storage of renewable energies”. It also has the advantage of using an element, sodium, thousands of times more abundant on Earth than lithium.
Since 1954, the CNRS gold medal has been awarded every year “all the work of a scientific personality who has made an exceptional contribution to the dynamism and influence of French research”. It will be awarded to him, with an endowment of 50,000 euros, next December at a ceremony in Paris. Last year, the award crowned the work of physicist Jean Dalibard.