Osheroff was born in
Aberdeen, Washington. His father, William Osheroff, was the son of
Jewish immigrants who left
Russia. His mother, Bessie Anne (Ondov), a nurse, was the daughter of
Slovak immigrants (her own father was a Lutheran minister) from the
Felvidék, Upper Hungary,
Kingdom of Hungary. Osheroff was
confirmed in the Lutheran Church but he was given the chance to choose and decided not to attend any longer. He has stated "In some sense it seemed that lying in church is the worst place to lie. I guess at some emotional level I accept the idea of God, but I don't know how God would manifest itself." Osheroff earned his
bachelor's degree in 1967 from
Caltech, where he attended lectures by
Richard Feynman and did undergraduate research for
Gerry Neugebauer. Osheroff joined the
Laboratory of Atomic and Solid State Physics at
Cornell University as a graduate student, doing research in low-temperature physics. Together with David Lee, the head of the laboratory, and Robert C. Richardson, Osheroff used a
Pomeranchuk cell to investigate the behaviour of
3He at temperatures within a few thousandths of a degree of absolute zero. They discovered unexpected effects in their measurements, which they eventually explained as phase transitions to a superfluid phase of 3He. He married a biochemist, Phyllis Liu-Osheroff, in 1970. Osheroff is one of the 20 American recipients of the Nobel Prize in Physics to sign a letter addressed to President
George W. Bush in May 2008, urging him to "reverse the damage done to basic science research in the Fiscal Year 2008 Omnibus Appropriations Bill" by requesting additional emergency funding for the
Department of Energy’s
Office of Science, the
National Science Foundation, and the
National Institute of Standards and Technology. ==Awards and honors==