[4] 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] After a period as a postdoctoral researcher[9] in genetics and genomics at the Whitehead Institute in Cambridge, Massachusetts with Richard A.

[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.

[7] 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.