Jeremiah P. Ostriker received his B.A. from Harvard, and his Ph.D. in astrophysics from the University of Chicago in 1964. After spending a year as a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Cambridge, he accepted a position as a research associate and lecturer at Princeton University in 1965. From 1971 to 1995, Ostriker was a professor at Princeton, and served as Provost there from 1995 to 2001. From 2001 to 2003, he was appointed as Plumian Professor of Astronomy and Experimental Philosophy at the Institute of Astronomy, Cambridge. He returned to Princeton as the Charles Young Professor of Astronomy and is now the Charles A. Young Professor Emeritus. He continues as a Senior Research Scholar at Princeton and became a Professor of Astronomy at Columbia in 2012, remaining now on the research staff.
Ostriker has been very influential in advancing the theory that most of the mass in the universe is not visible at all, but consists of dark matter. His research has also focused on the interstellar medium, galaxy evolution, cosmology and black holes. He has investigated many areas of research, including the structure and oscillations of rotating stars, the stability of galaxies, the evolution of globular clusters and other star systems, pulsars, X-ray binary stars, the dynamics of clusters of galaxies, gravitational lensing, astrophysical blast waves, active galactic nuclei, the cosmic web, and galaxy formation. He is notably known for the Ostriker-Peebles criterion, relating to the stability of galactic form.
He has won numerous awards and honors including Karl Schwarzschild Medal, National Medal of Science, Gold Medal of the Royal Astronomical Society, Bruce Medal, White House Champion of Change and Gruber Prize in Cosmology to name a few.