Dr Duncan Odom

Former Associate Faculty

Alumni

This person is a member of Sanger Institute Alumni.

This page is no longer being updated and is a historical record of Duncan Odom’s work at the Sanger Institute.

Duncan Odom's research compares how transcription and transcriptional regulation vary during evolution, and the implications this regulatory plasticity has for diseases such as cancer. His team uses numerous new high-throughput methods combined with analysis of multiple mammals and vertebrates to reveal fundamental biological insights into tissue-specification and genome evolution.

Duncan graduated from the New College of Florida in 1995 with a BA in Chemistry, and obtained his PhD in 2001 for work in the field of Inorganic Chemistry at Caltech. In 2001, he changed research fields to undertake postdoctoral studies in genetics and genomics at the Whitehead Institute at MIT, where he developed and deployed new methods in transcriptional regulation. His first major work as a postdoctoral fellow showed that primary human tissue can be used to map where diabetes-linked transcription factors bind the human genome in liver and pancreatic islets in vivo.

In 2006, he established his research group at the University of Cambridge. His independent research has focused on understanding how and why different species use highly conserved, tissue-specific transcriptional machinery in surprisingly different ways.

Duncan’s appointment in 2011 at the Sanger Institute will allow his group to combine their comparative functional genomics approaches with the intellectual and research strengths of the other Sanger faculty in related areas.