Lee was born and raised inRye,New York.[4] His parents, Annette (Franks), a teacher, and Marvin Lee, an electrical engineer, were children ofJewish immigrants fromEngland andLithuania. He graduated fromHarvard University in 1952 and then joined theU.S. Army for 22 months. After being discharged from the army, he obtained a master's degree from theUniversity of Connecticut. In 1955 Lee entered the Ph.D. program atYale University where he worked underHenry A. Fairbank in the low-temperature physics group, doing experimental research on liquid3He.
After graduating from Yale in 1959, Lee took a job atCornell University, where he was responsible for setting up the newLaboratory of Atomic and Solid State Physics. Shortly after arriving at Cornell he met his future wife, Dana, then a PhD student in another department; the couple went on to have two sons.
The work that led to Lee's Nobel Prize was performed in the early 1970s. Lee, together withRobert C. Richardson and graduate student,Doug Osheroff used aPomeranchuk cell to investigate the behaviour of3He at temperatures within a few thousandths of a degree of absolute zero. They discovered unexpected effects in their measurements, which they eventually explained as phase transitions to a superfluid phase of3He.[8][9] Lee, Richardson and Osheroff were jointly awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1996 for this discovery.
Lee's research also covered a number of other topics in low-temperature physics, particularly relating to liquid, solid and superfluid helium (4He,3He and mixtures of the two). Particular discoveries include the antiferromagnetic ordering in solid helium-3,nuclear spin waves in spin polarized atomic hydrogen gas withJack H. Freed, and the tri-critical point on the phase separation curve of liquid4He-3He, in collaboration with his Cornell colleagueJohn Reppy. His former research group at Cornell currently studies impurity-helium solids.
^Osheroff, DD; WJ Gully; RC Richardson; DM Lee (1972-10-02). "New Magnetic Phenomena in Liquid He3 below 3mK".Physical Review Letters.29 (14). American Physical Society:920–923.Bibcode:1972PhRvL..29..920O.doi:10.1103/PhysRevLett.29.920.
