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Nobel Prize Winner Douglas D. Osheroff Delivers Morgan Science Lecture at Appalachian

March 16, 2012. BOONE — Dr. Douglas D. Osheroff will deliver the 2012 Morgan Science Lecture on Tuesday, March 27, at Appalachian State University. He will speak on “How Advances Are Made in Science,” including how the MRI developed from a physics research project. 

His presentation will be given at Farthing Auditorium at 8 p.m. and is free and open to the public. The lecture is sponsored by the College of Arts and Sciences’ Morgan Lecture Series. 

Osheroff is from the Department of Physics at Stanford University and is co-recipient of the 1996 Nobel Prize in Physics. 

Prior to his lecture, Osheroff will deliver a seminar to science faculty and students titled “So, What Really Happens at Absolute Zero,” on Monday, March 26, at 4:15 p.m. in Room 112 Chemistry, Astronomy and Physics Building. 

Osheroff is the J.G. Jackson and C.J. Wood Professor of Physics and the Gerhard Casper University Fellow in Undergraduate Education at Stanford University. He received a Bachelor of Science from the California Institute of Technology and a Ph.D. in physics from Cornell University. While working on his Ph.D., Osheroff discovered three superfluid phases of liquid helium-3 for which he and his professors received the Nobel Prize in 1996.

From Cornell he went to Bell Labs, where he spent 15 years in their low temperature department, the last six years as head of that department.

Osheroff has been at Stanford for 25 years and has become an award-winning teacher, and twice the physics department chair. He continues as a long-standing lecturer in the introductory physics sequence. He also teaches freshmen in small group settings through his seminar course on photography. 

In addition to the Nobel Prize, Osheroff has received the Simon Memorial Award, Oliver Buckley Prize, a MacArthur Fellowship and the 1991 Walter J. Gores Award for Excellence in Teaching. 

In spring 2003, he became a member of the Columbia Accident Investigation Board, which investigated the circumstances of the breakup of the Columbia shuttle during its reentry. His current research involves the properties of matter at temperatures near absolute zero, and studies of quantum fluids and solids at ultra-low temperatures. He is an author of more than 100 scientific publications in these areas.

Since 1990, the privately funded Morgan Lecture Series has brought well-known scientists to campus to lecture on a range of topics within the fields of geology, chemistry, biology, physics and astronomy.