Born on August 1, 1945 in Aberdeen, Washington, Osheroff was the second of five children. His father was the son of Jewish immigrants from Russia, while his mother’s family came from Slovakia.

While his father and grandfather were both physicians, Osheroff never considered a career in medicine. At an early age he instead became an avid "experimenter" dismantling toys to play with their electric motors. This interest grew into a passion for conducting electrical and mechanical experiments that often involved an element of danger—such as constructing a home-made rifle that blew a hole through two walls of his family's home!

To avoid an academic competition with his older brother at Stanford University, Osheroff chose to attend the California Institute of Technology (Caltech), where he studied under the physicist and Nobel Laureate Richard Feynman. In his senior year, Osheroff became fascinated with the physics of low temperatures, and as a result decided to go into solid state physics.

After graduating from Caltech, Osheroff entered Cornell University in 1967. Working at the university’s Laboratory of Atomic and Solid State Physics with David Lee and Robert C. Richardson, he and his colleagues began to investigate the behavior of helium-3 at temperatures within a few thousands of a degree of absolute zero.

It is during this time that Osheroff noticed the almost imperceptible fluctuations in the rate of pressure change, which marks the conditions under which helium-3 changes from a liquid to a superfluid. This discovery sparked intensive research into superfluid helium-3 and other so-called “quantum liquids”, as it enabled scientists to study the types of quantum mechanical effects in large, visible systems that could previously only be studied at the atomic and subatomic level. It is from this discovery that Lee, Richardson and Osheroff would later be jointly awarded the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1996.

In 1972, Osheroff moved to AT&T Bell Laboratories in New Jersey, where he continued his work into helium-3 superfluidity. Between 1973 and 1978 he measured many characteristics of the superfluid phases. He continued his research at Bell Laboratories as head of the Department of Solid State and Low Temperature Research until 1987, when he accepted the post of Professor of Physics and Applied Physics at Stanford, where he remains today. There, Osheroff has continued his research on both superfluid and solid helium-3 and their phases.

Along with his work in Physics, Osheroff was also appointed to the Columbia Accident Investigation Board in 2003 following the Space Shuttle Columbia disaster and currently serves on the board of advisors of Scientists and Engineers for America, an organization focused on promoting sound science in American government.

When not in a lab or lecturing, Osheroff indulges in two other passions he holds dear—photography and gardening—hobbies inherited from his father.