PROF DUNCAN ODUM

GERMAN CANCER RESEARCH CENTER, GERMANY

Duncan Odom obtained his PhD from Caltech, undertook a postdoc at the Whitehead Institute at MIT, was faculty at the University of Cambridge / Cancer Research UK Cambridge Institute for over a decade, and since 2019 has been at the University of Heidelberg and the German Cancer Research Center. His laboratory addresses ambitious, interdisciplinary questions in genetics, genome regulation, cancer biology, and evolution. One lab focus is studying the mechanisms underlying the extensive and rapid turn-over of tissue-specific transcription factor binding, CTCF insulator elements, polymerase occupancies, and enhancer activities among mammalian. Another major research focus has produced fundamental insights into the mechanisms underpinning mammalian ageing, by identifying that increased cell-to-cell variability is a key hallmark of age-related functional decay. Most recently, he has used chemical carcinogenesis to model earliest steps of tumour genome evolution and clonal expansion, as well as the conservation of these mechanisms across mammalian space.