Duncan Odom

Duncan T. Odom is a research division head at the German Cancer Research Center (DKFZ) in Heidelberg, and a University Professor at Heidelberg University. Previously he was a research group leader at the Cancer Research UK Cambridge Institute (CRUK CI) at the University of Cambridge (2006-2022)^[3][8][6] and an associate faculty member at the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute (2011-2018).^[4]

Duncan T. Odom
Born	Duncan Odom
Alma mater	New College of Florida (BA) California Institute of Technology (PhD)
Awards	Crick Lecture (2014)[1] EMBO Member (2015)[2] Mary Lyon Award (2016)
Scientific career
Fields	Evolution Genomics Bioinformatics Transition metal chemistry Gene expression[3]
Institutions	DKFZ German Cancer Research Center Heidelberg University University of Cambridge Cancer Research UK Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute[4] Whitehead Institute
Thesis	The application of metallointercalators in recognition of and charge transport in nucleic acids (2001)
Doctoral advisor	Jacqueline Barton[5]
Other academic advisors	Richard A. Young[6]
Doctoral students	Christina Ernst[7]
Website	www.dkfz.de/en/regulatorische-genomik

Education

Odom was educated at the New College of Florida where he was awarded a Bachelor of Arts degree in Chemistry in 1995.^[4] He continued his study at California Institute of Technology (Caltech) where he was awarded a PhD in chemistry for research on DNA-binding metallo-intercalators supervised by Jacqueline Barton.^[6][5]

Career and research

After a period as a postdoctoral researcher^[9] in genetics and genomics at the Whitehead Institute in Cambridge, Massachusetts with Richard A. Young,^[4] he established his research group at the University of Cambridge in 2006.^[6] His research investigates how transcription and transcriptional regulation vary during evolution, and its implications for diseases such as cancer, using high throughput biology methods to investigate genome evolution.^{[10][11][12][13]} As of 2017^[update], according to Google Scholar his most highly-cited papers have been published in Cell,^[14] Chemical Reviews,^[15] and Science.^[16][17]

His research has been funded by the National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases,^[6] the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, the European Research Council (ERC),^{[citation needed]} the European Molecular Biology Organization (EMBO), the Wellcome Trust^[18] and Cancer Research UK.^[6] His former doctoral students include Christina Ernst.^[7]

Awards and honours

Odom was awarded the Crick Lecture by the Royal Society in 2014^[1][19] for his "pioneering work in the field of comparative functional genomics, which has changed our understanding of the evolution of mammalian transcriptional regulation."^[1] He was awarded EMBO Membership in 2015,^[2] and the Mary F. Lyon Medal from The Genetics Society in 2016.^[20]