Teri W. Odom

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Teri W. Odom is the Board of Lady Managers of the Columbian Exposition Professor of Chemistry and a professor of materials science and engineering at Northwestern University. Her research focuses on controlling materials at the 100-nanometer scale and investigating their size- and shape-dependent optical properties. She has developed massively parallel, multiscale nanopatterning tools to generate noble metal (plasmonic) structures that can manipulate visible light at the nanoscale and exhibit extraordinary optical properties.

Odom’s lab has shown how metal films perforated with arrays of nanoholes exhibit enhanced optical transmission and how 3D, pyramidal nanoshells can concentrate light into nanoscale volumes. These example structures are promising for biological imaging, sensing, and cancer diagnostic and therapeutic applications. At Radcliffe, Odom aims to develop low-cost and situationally appropriate diagnostic tools for low- and middle-income countries by bridging key partners and combining first-world advances (nanotechnology) with cheap and commercially available materials (gold leaf, cell phones).

Odom received her BS from Stanford University and her PhD in chemical physics from Harvard University. Selected honors include the National Fresenius Award from Phi Lambda Upsilon, an NIH Director’s Pioneer Award, an Outstanding Young Investigator Award from the Materials Research Society, a Packard Fellowship for Science and Engineering, and a Sloan Research Fellowship. Odom is an associate editor for Chemical Science and is on the editorial advisory boards of ACS Nano, the Journal of Physical Chemistry, and Nano Letters.