Stern completed his studies at the University of Breslau in 1912 with a doctoral dissertation in physical chemistry under supervision of Otto Sackur on the kinetic theory of osmotic pressure in concentrated solutions. He then followed Albert Einstein to Charles University in Prague and in 1913 to ETH Zurich. Stern served in World War I doing meteorological work on the Russian front while still continuing his studies and in 1915 received his Habilitation at the University of Frankfurt. In 1921 he became a professor at the University of Rostock which he left in 1923 to become Director of the newly founded Institut für Physikalische Chemie at the University of Hamburg.
After resigning from his post at the University of Hamburg in 1933 because of the Nazis' Machtergreifung (seizure of power), he became professor of physics at the Carnegie Institute of Technology. During the 1930s, he was a visiting professor at the University of California, Berkeley.
He was awarded the 1943 Nobel Prize in Physics, the first to be awarded since 1939. He was the sole recipient in Physics that year, and the award citation omitted mention of the Stern–Gerlach experiment, as Gerlach had remained active in Nazi-led Germany.
After Stern retired from the Carnegie Institute of Technology, he moved to Berkeley, California. He was a regular visitor to the Physics colloquium at UC Berkeley. He died of a heart attack in Berkeley on 17 August 1969.
As an experimental Physicist Stern contributed to the discovery of spin quantization in the Stern–Gerlach experiment with Walther Gerlach in February 1922 at the Physikalischer Verein in Frankfurt am Main; demonstration of the wave nature of atoms and molecules; measurement of atomic magnetic moments; discovery of the proton's magnetic moment; and development of the molecular beam method which is utilized for the technique of molecular beam epitaxy.
