Electrochemical Engineering

John Newman was born in Richmond, Virginia, in 1938. He earned a B.S. in Chemical Engineering from Northwestern; and during this period he was also a co-op student at Oak Ridge National Laboratory. In 1960, he entered the University of California, Berkeley, to study under Professor Charles Tobias. He obtained his M.S. in 1962 and his Ph.D. in 1963. His master thesis was on the analysis and behavior of porous electrodes, which is the topic of this chapter. His doctoral dissertation investigated laminar flow past a cylinder at high Reynolds number. During his graduate studies, he also helped prepare the English edition of Levich's book, Physicochemical Hydrodynamics, published in 1962.

Following his Ph.D., he joined the faculty in Chemical Engineering at U.C. Berkeley. He won the Young Author's prize from the Electrochemical Society for work in current distributions on a rotating disk below the limiting current in 1966 and a second time in 1969 with William Parish on modeling channel electrochemical flow cells. Dr. Newman was promoted to full professor in 1970. The bulk of his work is contained in his monograph, Electrochemical Systems, published in 1973. The first edition has been translated into Russian and Japanese. In 1975, Professor Newman (along with a long-time collaborator, Bill Tiedemann) published one of his most influential papers, “Porous-Electrode Theory with Battery ...