Since receiving his Ph.D. in astronomy from Harvard University in 1982, he has been an astronomer in the Washington, D.C. area, primarily at NASA's Goddard Spaceflight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland.

He then worked with Dr. Giovanni Fazio, and completed his Ph.D. in 1982 by investigating the far-infrared properties of the Galactic Center of the Milky Way and the interstellar environment of a million-solar-mass black hole found there.

[4] Following the completion of his Ph.D., Odenwald moved to Washington, D.C., in 1982, where he worked as a postdoctoral candidate at the Space Sciences Division of the Naval Research Laboratory until 1990.

Subsequently, he worked with the IRAS infrared data to investigate the frequency and distribution of young stellar objects in the Cygnus-X region,[9][10] detect asteroidal debris disks surrounding sun-like stars,[11] and conducted an investigation of a new class of interstellar dust clouds that he had discovered, beginning with the archetype of this class called the Draco Cloud.

[13] At NRL, and working with Dr. Kandiah Shivanandan,[14] he built a cryogenically cooled array camera that operated in the mid-infrared, and made frequent trips to the Wyomning Infrared Observatory (WIRO)[15] to collaborate with Prof. Harley Thronsen[16] to map a variety of compact infrared sources.

Odenwald debuted the Ask the Astronomer section of the site in 1996, where he invited people to email questions about astronomy, and he would post the answers.