About

Teri Odom is the Joan Husting Madden and William H. Madden, Jr. Professor of Chemistry and a Professor of Materials Science and Engineering (by courtesy) at Northwestern University. His research interests include nanofabrication, plasmonic materials and characterization, nano-lasers, and bioimaging. Odom has made significant contributions to the field of nanotechnology, particularly in the development of plasmonic nanostructures and their applications in imaging and lasing. He has received numerous awards and honors, including the Editor-in-Chief position at Nano Letters, the ACS Award in Surface Chemistry, and fellowships from the Optical Society of America, the American Physical Society, the Materials Research Society, and the Royal Society of Chemistry. His work has been recognized for its innovation and impact across multiple disciplines, and he has been involved in advancing the understanding and application of nanomaterials in science and engineering.

Research topics

• Materials science
• Nanotechnology
• Optoelectronics
• Biochemistry
• Biology
• Chemistry
• Biophysics
• Cell biology
• Optics
• Physics

Selected publications

• Many-body entanglement in solid-state emitters

  Nature Reviews Materials · 2026-02-17 · 2 citations

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• Peer Review and AI: Your (Human) Opinion Is What Matters

  ACS Nano · 2026-01-22 · 2 citations

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• Bimetallic Plasmonic Nanoparticle Lattices for Photocatalytic Chemical Transformations

  Nano Letters · 2026-01-01 · 1 citations

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  Plasmonic metasurfaces offer unique opportunities to manipulate light at the nanoscale and drive photocatalytic reactions, but fabrication challenges and inefficient catalytic interfaces have limited their use in heterogeneous catalysis. Here, we report scalable bimetallic metasurfaces, fabricated by combining soft lithography with templated chemical synthesis, that consist of centimeter-scale arrays of spiky Au nanoparticles decorated with Pt (spiky Au@Pt). These arrays enhance the rate of the hydrogen–deuterium exchange reaction (H2 + D2 ⇋ 2HD), a benchmark photocatalytic process, by 13-fold compared to smooth Au@Pt arrays and reduce the apparent activation energy by nearly half. This activity also exceeds that of similar planar photocatalyst systems reported previously, even at lower illumination intensities. Wavelength-dependent activity, electromagnetic simulations, and quantum-based calculations reveal that strong near-field confinement at sharp Au tips and resonant gap-plasmon excitation promote plasmon-enhanced reactivity, highlighting nanoscale morphology engineering as a pathway to improve photocatalytic metasurfaces.

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• High-Chirality Polariton Lasing from Symmetry-Broken Plasmonic Lattices

  ACS Nano · 2025-05-07 · 11 citations

  articleSenior authorCorresponding

  Chiral polariton lasing is a source of circularly polarized, energy-efficient coherent emission. However, generating high optical contrast of opposite handedness is challenging because excitonic gain materials show low circular dichroism at room temperature. In addition, highly chiral lasing requires the symmetry of the optical cavities to be broken, which can affect the resonance quality and result in low-chiral purity. Here, we report how plasmonic nanoparticle lattice cavities having mismatched dimer unit cells strongly coupled to CdSe nanoplatelets can facilitate polariton lasing with low threshold fluences (8 μJ/cm2) and high chiral purity (∼0.92). This lasing threshold is at least two times lower than that of other systems at room temperature, and the chirality approaches the theoretical maximum. These room-temperature characteristics are promising for using chiral polariton lasing in a broad range of applications, from spintronics to optoelectronics to quantum information processing.

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• Templated Synthesis of Mono- and Bimetallic Nanogap Dimer Arrays

  ACS Nano · 2025-03-03 · 11 citations

  articleSenior authorCorresponding

  This work demonstrates a templated synthesis of mono- and bimetallic nanoparticle dimers starting from patterned Au nanoparticle seeds. Growth rates of the shell layers and the interparticle distances were adjusted by varying the solution pH and reaction time. Using metal ion sources in aqueous solutions and controlling reduction kinetics, we prepared Au@shell (Au, Ag, Pd, and Pt) nanoparticle dimers with sub-10 nm gap widths. Au@Ag dimers exhibited an order-of-magnitude higher surface-enhanced Raman spectroscopy signal compared to Au@Au dimers with similar gap separations. The generation of Au@Pd and Au@Pt nanoparticle dimers enabled concurrent surface catalysis and SERS to observe the Suzuki-Miyaura reaction and a nitroaromatic reduction reaction, respectively. This templated synthesis method offers precise control of nanogap width and surface properties, providing a versatile platform for plasmon-based catalysis and molecular sensing.

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• The Next 25 Years of Nanoscience and Nanotechnology: A <i>Nano Letters</i> Roadmap

  Nano Letters · 2025-08-27 · 8 citations

  editorialOpen accessSenior author

  Recommendations2 025 marks the 25th anniversary of Nano Letters, and to celebrate this milestone, our editorial team has put together a Roadmap for the next 25 years.Nanoscience and nanotechnology have come a long way since the first journals dedicated exclusively to nanoscale concepts were founded.In this prospective piece, we have identified 7 macroscale themes broken down into 16 key topical areas and speculated about their strategic, developmental, and translational milestones.We have tried to be specific and quantitative regarding examples highlighted without being overly prescriptive.We have also done our best to propose big-picture and high-risk breakthroughs that will require integrated disciplinary expertise, significant resource investments, and decades-long time horizons for realization.We hope that you are as optimistic and excited about the future of nanoscience as we are and that this Roadmap can be an aspirational and functional guidepost for our community.

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• Welcome, Early Career Board 2025

  Nano Letters · 2025-08-27

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• Plasmonic lattice lasers

  Nature Reviews Materials · 2025-05-13 · 22 citations

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• Tuning polariton lasing with phase-gradient plasmonic lattices

  2025-09-16

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  Polariton lasing exploiting exciton-photon strong coupling offers a unique approach to realize energy-efficient coherent emission. Precise control of lasing beams is key to advancing optical technologies, but fine-tuning emitters at nanoscale is challenging, and current Fabry-Pérot type microcavities lack flexibility for modifications. This talk will describe an approach to leverage geometric phase gradients in diffractively coupled plasmonic nanoparticle lattices as the cavity design for polariton generation. We combine the array with CdSe nanoplatelets of high oscillator-strength and optical gain, enabling polariton lasing emission with low thresholds. By altering the nanoparticle assembly, we demonstrate the ability to tailor directionality, polarization, and beam profile. These results exhibit a pathway to unlock new degrees of freedom in redistributing polariton energy and offer a compact and versatile platform for next-generation photonic devices.

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• Tuning Polariton Interactions in Plasmonic Lattices Strongly Coupled to CdSe Nanoplatelets

  ACS Photonics · 2025-07-31 · 1 citations

  articleSenior authorCorresponding

  Exciton-polaritons are hybrid light-matter excitations that are facilitating advances in quantum computing, low-threshold lasing, and modified chemical reactivities. The ability to tune polariton interactions, including polariton–polariton and polariton-exciton scattering, enables ready control over important nonlinear dynamics. This paper describes strong coupling between cadmium selenide nanoplatelets and 2D plasmonic lattice cavities at an energy around 2.7 eV and with Rabi splitting of 90 meV. Transient absorption spectroscopy was used to reveal both a time-dependent blue-shift in absorption and a decreased polariton lifetime as a function of increased pump fluence from polariton interactions. Detuning of the cavity by changing lattice periodicity resulted in polaritons with more excitonic character and increased blueshift as well as decreased polariton lifetime, consistent with increased polariton repulsion. This work demonstrates a system that can be used to dynamically control light–matter coupling for next-generation photonic and quantum applications.

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Recent grants

• Reconstructing Sub-cellular Structure using Plasmonic Metamaterials

  NIH · $3.0M · 2008–2013

• Correlative Tools for in Situ Analysis of Single Nanoparticles and their Ligands

  NSF · $803k · 2018–2023

• Project 1: Design Rules for Spherical Nucleic Acids that Target Cancer

  NIH · $23.4M · 2021

• NUE: Unconventional Patterning at the Nanoscale: Bottom-up Synthesis Meets Top-Down Fabrication

  NSF · $100k · 2004–2008

• Reconstructing Sub-cellular Structure using Plasmonic Metamaterials

  NIH · $755k · 2008–2015

Frequent coauthors

• Paul S. Weiss

  California NanoSystems Institute

  87 shared

• Laura L. Kiessling

  Massachusetts Institute of Technology

  86 shared

• Harry A. Atwater

  California Institute of Technology

  86 shared

• Jillian M. Buriak

  University of Alberta

  86 shared

• Kirk S. Schanze

  86 shared

• Prashant V. Kamat

  University of Notre Dame

  86 shared

• Peter J. Stang

  University of Utah

  86 shared

• Joseph A. Loo

  University of California, Los Angeles

  85 shared

Labs

• The Odom GroupPI

Education

• PhD, Chemistry

  Harvard University

  2011

• BS, Chemistry

  Stanford University

  1996

Awards & honors

• Editor-in-Chief, Nano Letters, 2020
• American Chemical Society (ACS) Award in Surface Chemistry,…
• Fellow of the Optical Society of America (OSA), 2019
• Fellow of the American Physical Society (APS), 2018
• Research Corporation for Science Advancement (RCSA) Cottrell…