Duncan Odom
Duncan Odom is a group leader at the German Cancer Research Institute (DKFZ) where his research focuses on regulatory genomics and cancer evolution. Duncan completed his undergrad at New College of Florida before pursuing doctoral research in inorganic chemistry at the California Institute of Technology. For his postdoctoral work, he joined the Whitehead Institute at MIT where he developed genomics tools to explore transcription factor binding in eukaryotes. In 2006, he started his independent research group at the University of Cambridge's Cancer Research UK-Cambridge Institute, and later moved to Heidelberg in 2019. His lab’s research has three major themes. The first is directed at understanding how genetic sequence variation influences genome regulation and gene expression. To that end, pioneering comparative interspecies genomics approaches have yielded insights on the widespread and rapid turnover of tissue-specific transcription factor binding, CTCF/insulator elements, polymerase occupancies, and enhancer activities. Second, his lab works on uncovering the earliest mechanisms of cancer genome formation, using chemical carcinogenesis to induce and characterize liver tumors in different mammalian species. Lastly, Duncan’s research explores how aging interacts with genetic diversity in shaping genome stability. Analysis of single cell data has shown how ageing can result in substantial increases in cell-to-cell transcriptional variability in the immune system. Beyond his scientific contributions, Duncan enjoys fire hula-hooping and acroyoga.
You can find his lab website here
