Stanford Robert Ovshinsky (November 24, 1922 – October 17, 2012) was an American engineer, scientist and inventor who over a span of fifty years was granted well over 400 patents, mostly in the areas of energy and information. Many of his inventions have had wide-ranging applications. Among the most prominent are: the nickel-metal hydride battery, which has been widely used in laptop computers, digital cameras, cell phones, and electric and hybrid cars; flexible thin-film solar energy laminates and panels; flat panel liquid crystal displays; rewritable CD and DVD discs; hydrogen fuel cells; and nonvolatile phase-change memory.

Ovshinsky opened the scientific field of amorphous and disordered materials in the course of his research in the 1940s and 50s in neurophysiology, neural disease, the nature of intelligence in mammals and machines, and cybernetics. Amorphous silicon semiconductors have become the basis of many technologies and industries. Ovshinsky is also distinguished in being self-taught, without formal college or graduate training.

Ovshinsky was born and grew up in the industrial town of Akron, Ohio, then at the center of the American rubber industry. The elder son of working-class Lithuanian Jewish immigrant parents who left Eastern Europe around 1905—Benjamin Ovshinsky from Lithuania and Bertha Munitz from what is now Belarus—Ovshinsky became active in social activities at an early age during the Great Depression. His lifelong concern to better the lives of workers and minorities, as well as to advance culture and the interests of industry, derive largely from his father, who was a generous, liberal, and highly cultured activist. With his horse and wagon, and later his truck, Ben Ovshinsky made his living collecting scrap metal from factories and foundries. Based on his father's example, and on teachings offered by the Akron Workmen's Circle, an organization mainly of Jewish immigrants who believed in social justice, Stan Ovshinsky developed a deep commitment to social values, including labor rights, civil rights, and civil liberties.

Before graduating from high school in June 1941, Ovshinsky worked as a teacher, tool maker and machinist in various local shops affiliated with the rubber industry. During the Second World War, he and his bride, Norma Rifkin, moved to Arizona, where Ovshinsky worked for a time in the tool room of a Goodyear plant in Litchfield, not far from Phoenix. Returning to Akron shortly before the end of the war, Ovshinsky eventually established his own machine company, Stanford Roberts, initially in a barn. There he developed and patented his first invention, the Benjamin Center Drive, named after his father. This unique automatic high-speed center drive lathe had many important uses. After Ovshinsky sold his company to the New Britain Machine Company in Connecticut, it was used to help solve the national crisis of making artillery shells in large enough volume for wartime needs during the Korean War. Meanwhile, Ovshinsky continued to develop his growing interest in human and machine intelligence, avidly studying the research literature on neurophysiology, neurological disease, and cybernetics, corresponding briefly with Norbert Wiener.

In 1951, Ovshinsky accepted an offer to move to Detroit and work in the automotive industry as the director of research at the Hupp Motor Company. Continuing his work on intelligent machines, he invented electric power steering, but Hupp's president was opposed to completing the arrangements with General Motors to utilize the product. Not long after that, Stan and his younger brother Herb Ovshinsky, a talented mechanical engineer, established a small company called General Automation in a Detroit storefront. There, Stan continued his study of intelligent machines and embarked on early research and development of various energy and information technologies. At the same time, he began studying neurophysiology and neurological diseases. On the basis of his early writings about nerve impulses and the nature of intelligence, he was invited by Wayne Medical School in June 1955 to participate in pioneering experimental research on the mammalian cerebellum.

By the late 1950s, working at General Automation, Ovshinsky brought together these disparate studies in an invention. Crossing scientific disciplines that academics traditionally hold separate, including neurophysiology and cybernetics, Stan invented, and Herb Ovshinsky helped build, a mechanical model of a nerve cell – an amorphous thin-film switch they called the Ovitron. Stan patented the device and the brothers disclosed it publicly in 1959 in New York City. In an attempt to model the learning ability of nerve cells, which Stan recognized as deriving from the plasticity of the cell's membrane, he drew on his knowledge of surfaces and materials to fashion very thin layers of amorphous material, thus pioneering the use of nanostructures. He created these layers by combining elements, especially from the Group 16 elements under oxygen, known as chalcogenides, including sulphur, selenium, and tellurium. He would continue to work with chalcogenides in his inventions for decades to come.

On January 1, 1960, Ovshinsky and Iris Miroy Dibner, whom he married soon after his divorce from Norma Rifkin, founded Energy Conversion Laboratory to develop his inventions in the interest of solving societal problems, especially those they identified in the areas of information and energy (e.g. pollution and wars over oil). Iris had a BA in zoology from Swarthmore College, an MS in biology from the University of Michigan, and a PhD in biochemistry from Boston University. Continuing to work on his atomically designed chalcogenide materials, which Ovshinsky realized offer unique electronic physical mechanisms, he utilized chain structures, cross links, polymeric concepts, and divalent structural bonding with a huge number of unbonded lone pairs to achieve what is now referred to as the Ovshinsky Effect – "an effect that turns special types of glassy, thin films into semiconductors upon application of low voltage." Applying this effect, he built new types of electronic and optical switches, including his Ovonic Phase Change Memory and his Threshold Switch. The former would become the basis of his subsequent inventions of rewritable CDs and DVDs and other new computer technologies including his cognitive computer. The latter is used in phase change memory that is entering the consumer market in 2017. While others working in the crystalline field were building devices based on bulk materials, Ovshinsky's work in the 1960s and later continued to be based on thin films and nanostructures. Recognizing the significance of his results, Ovshinsky applied for a patent on June 21, 1961 and, in 1962, made his first licensing pact on phase-change memory.

By the spring of 1963, the Ovshinskys had exhausted the savings with which they had initially funded ECL. Before seeking public funding, Stan wanted validation of the importance of his work from a well-recognized scientist. He telephoned Nobel Laureate John Bardeen, a co-inventor of the transistor and co-discoverer of the BCS theory of superconductivity. Bardeen immediately recognized the importance of Ovshinsky's work but his schedule did not permit him to visit ECL for five months. Stan replied, "We'll be broke by then." In his place, Bardeen sent Hellmut Fritzsche, a University of Chicago physicist. Fritzsche became very positive in his support of Ovshinsky's work and helped attract other scientists to the Ovshinsky laboratory. As Fritzsche and Brian Schwartz later wrote, "There is a mysterious quality in Ovshinsky's persona that attracts people into his sphere, builds life long friendships and awakens deep respect and devotion. Meeting him leaves each person with a deep impression of his superior intellect, his self confidence, his compassion to improve society combined with his certainty that his vision can be realized. His enthusiasm is contagious. In his presence, you feel how exciting it would be to join him in his endeavors." Among the many famous scientists who came regularly to ECL as friends or collaborators over the next years, were David Adler, Bardeen, Arthur Bienenstock, Morrel H. Cohen, Kenichi Fukui, William Lipscomb, Sir Nevill Mott, Linus Pauling, Isadore I. Rabi, Edward Teller, David Turnbull, Victor Weisskopf, and Robert R. Wilson. Some joined as consultants or as members of the Board of Directors. Meanwhile, the ECL community developed a uniquely productive, non-hierarchical, multicultural, international environment, reflecting Stan and Iris' social values. In 1964, Stan and Iris changed the laboratory's name to Energy Conversion Devices and moved the company to larger quarters in Troy, Michigan.