[3] He graduated from James Madison High School in Brooklyn after which he enrolled in Dartmouth College aiming to pursue medicine.

[3] After completing his bachelors, Sherwin briefly worked for the United States Navy, serving as an intelligence officer in Hawaii and Japan.

He also worked with Russian physicist Evgeny Velikhov to establish a collaboration for students at Tufts and Moscow State University.

[3] Sherwin's research focused on nuclear weapons, ranging from their initial development at the Los Alamos National Laboratory, as a part of the Manhattan Project; the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki; and the Cuban Missile Crisis, a part of the Cold War standoff between the Soviet Union and the United States in 1962.

[4] He collaborated with co-author Kai Bird on a biography of J. Robert Oppenheimer, "father of the atomic bomb", titled American Prometheus.