Douglas Dean Osheroff an American Physicist was born on 1^st August, 1945 in Aberdeen, Washington. is an American physicist who shared the 1996 Nobel Prize in Physics with David Lee and Robert C. Richardson for their discovery of "superfluidity in helium-3".

Osheroff's father was the son of Jewish immigrants who left Russia and his mother was the daughter of Slovak immigrants.Osheroff, born in Aberdeen, Washington, 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 thousands 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. Lee, Richardson and Osheroff were jointly awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1996 for this discovery. Osheroff received a Ph.D. from Cornell University in 1973. He then worked at Bell Labs in Murray Hill, New Jersey for 15 years, continuing to research low-temperature phenomena in 3He. In 1987 he moved to the Departments of Physics and Applied Physics at Stanford University, where he also served as department chair from 1993-96. His research is focused on phenomena that occur at extremely low temperatures. Osheroff was selected to serve on the Space Shuttle Columbia investigation panel, serving much the same role as Richard Feynman did on the Space Shuttle Challenger panel. He currently serves on the board of advisors of Scientists and Engineers for America, an organization focused on promoting sound science in American government. Osheroff is left-handed, and he often blames his slight quirks and eccentricities on it. He is also an avid photographer and introduces students at Stanford to medium-format film photography in a freshman seminar titled "The Technical Aspects of Photography." In addition, he has taught the Stanford introductory physics course on electricity and magnetism on multiple occasions, most recently in Spring 2008, as well as undergraduate labs on low temperature physics.

Prof. Osheroff gave two lectures

What really happens at absolute zero

How advances in science are made

As a part of the golden jubilee celebrations of IIT Kanpur, Professor Douglas Osheroff, delivered a talk under the title, 'How advances in science are made'. This talk was delivered to a packed Audience at the main Auditorium at IITK on the 12th of February, 2010. Professor Osheroff, who is one of the recipients of the 1996 Nobel Prize in Physics, used a Pomeranchuk cell to investigate the behavior of He-3 at very low temperatures during his graduate studies and discovered phase transition to the superfluid state in He-3. The talk started with the following profound question: "By their very nature, those discoveries that most change the way we think about nature cannot be anticipated. How, then, are such discoveries made, and are there research strategies which can increase the probability of making such a discovery?" Like a seasoned storyteller, Professor Osheroff then began his attempt to answer this question. Professor Osheroff vividly narrated the story of the discovery of superfluidity in He-3. He told the audience how, he, in the beginning of his graduate years, modified a Pomeranchuk cell which when coupled with He-4 - He-3 dilution refrigerators, gave good conditions for very-low temperature experiments. During his fifth year, when he was working on a problem which his thesis advisor wanted Professor Osheroff PhD thesis to be, two other graduate students made him give up the lab's only NMR magnet that he had monopolized for three months. He later realized that they had forced him to stop an experiment that was completely hopeless. Then, driven by curiosity, he started taking observations for the cooling rate of He-3 in a temperature range which, then, was unexplored and soon observed a kink in the cooling rate. This is the first reported observation of phase transition to the Superfluid phase in He-3. Lets sum up the strategies that he thinks he got right in professor Osheroff's own words:

"1. Utilize new technologies.

View nature from a new perspective or in a different realm.

2. Don’t give up when things are going badly.

Failure may be an invitation to try something new. The experimental apparatus that I was working on did give him problems, but keep walking.

3. Spend a little time doing something different.

Curiosity driven research can be very rewarding! When I was forced to work without the NMR, I asked simple questions to nature, that I was curious about and got the answers.

4. Avoid too many commitments.

The demands of good research do not adhere to a schedule; Even if it meant me not being able to take a course in Conversational Chinese, my wife's native language.

5. Back off from what you are doing occasionally to gain a better perspective on the task at hand.

We become myopic when we focus too tightly on our work. It was only after I tried to look for the big picture that I discovered 1-Dimensional MRI."

Similar tales of triumph of man in understanding nature in the field of experimental science were mentioned in the talk. They included that of Heike Kamerlingh Onnes who pioneered refrigeration techniques and explored how materials behaved when cooled to nearly absolute zero and that of Penzias and Wilson who, while using the Horn Antenna at Bell labs stumbled on the microwave background radiation that permeates the universe. The strategies that were used during the above research echoed Professor Osheroff belief on how one can increase the probability of making path breaking discoveries. I have no words more fitting to end this apart from this quote by professor Osheroff: "Advances in science are seldom made by individuals alone. They result from the progress of the scientific community, asking questions, developing new technologies to answer those questions, and sharing their results and their ideas with others. To have rapid progress, one must support scientific research broadly, and encourage scientists to interact with one another and to spend some of their time satisfying their own curiosities. This is How Advances in Science Are Made."