Richard M Osgood, Jr. attended the U.S. Military Academy for his undergraduate work. He went on to attend Ohio State University for his M.S. (1968), and finally the Massachusetts Institute of Technology for his Ph.D. (1973). He worked at MIT’s Lincoln Lab from 1973 until 1981. That year, he joined Columbia Microelectronics Sciences Laboratories, eventually becoming Director, and Columbia University. Today, he is Higgins Professor Emeritus of Electrical Engineering & Applied Physics at Columbia.

Osgood is a Fellow of OSA, APS, and IEEE. In 1991, he, along with Daniel J. Ehrlich and Thomas F. Deutsch, received OSA’s R. W. Wood Prize “for the invention of laser photochemical deposition and the application of laser induced photochemical reactions to materials processing.”