Daum received his Ph.D. summa cum laude in 1995 from the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich, where he taught for six years as an assistant professor.
From 2001 to 2002, Daum was a John F. Kennedy Memorial Fellow at the Center for European Studies at Harvard University.
[1] In 2010–11, he was a visiting scholar at the BMW Center for German and European Studies at Georgetown University.
He is best known as a biographer of Alexander von Humboldt[2] and for his studies on popular science, emigrants from Nazi Germany, and the United States’ special relationship with "America’s Berlin".
[7][8] Daum has received fellowships and grants from the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, American Philosophical Society, National Endowment for the Humanities, Smithsonian Institution, Gerda Henkel Foundation, DAAD, and the Studienstiftung des Deutschen Volkes.