After getting his Ph.D. in 1939, Odum was hired to be the first resident biologist at the Edmund Niles Huyck Preserve and Biological Research Station, in Rensselaerville, New York. The 430-acre preserve had been founded in 1931 and its research station established in 1938. The Preserve’s first summer research fellows, also selected in 1939, were Edward C. Raney and Donald Griffin. Raney, who had just finished his Ph.D. at Cornell, studied green frogs and bullfrogs; he went on to become a leading ichthyologist (zoologist who studies fish). Griffin, who was completing his Ph.D. at Harvard, did research on bat echolocation (he later became famous for that work).