He prefers to be called Hutton Oddy, but on Australia Day it was Dr Victor Hutton Oddy who received the Public Service Medal.
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His career spans more than 40 years with the NSW Government, mainly with the Department of Primary Industries where Dr Oddy is a senior principal research scientist. He also holds a position as an adjunct professor at UNE.
"I've been with the DPI since 1972, on and off," he said.
"When I started to work with the DPI at the drought unit after the 1965-67 drought, it was clear that the feeding recommendations weren't working. So, a lot of work put in to revise those.
"And so, I summarised the work they did in a new system for feeding livestock. To support that, we established a feeds evaluation service which was available to our advisors and to industry."
He said the system provided much better advice on how much to feed and when to feed livestock if drought ever came again.
"And it did," he said, and chuckled.
"It came in the 80s and then in the 90s, the droughts are just ongoing.
"So, that is the beginnings of my career, in terms of the delivery from my professional career to the public."
Dr Oddy said a researcher largely tested ideas and worked out what would work and what did not, what was the truth and what was not.
He reflected on the highlights of a career that was never solitary because it was essentially a team environment. Dr Oddy said research was impossible without a team, and he had worked with many good ones over the years.
"I led a team when I was with Meat and Livestock Australia that wound up sequencing the sheep genome. That then led onto the genome predictions use by Sheep CRC used in their new sheep genetics services,' he said.
"I was one of the founding people that led to that international team that ... was about having a genome sequence, so the tools you had for measurement of genetic improvement could be based off the actual structure of the genome.
"So, I've been involved with a whole range of different things, but it's covered a very wide field."
Dr Oddy also worked in methane mitigation.
"That led to a recent publication with a host of other authors, which revised downwards the methane production for beef cattle, particularly for northern Australia," he said.
"The original estimates were just too high ... not by much, just 10 or 15 per cent."
He has authored more than 100 peer reviewed scientific journal papers, including invited reviews and a book chapter, and well over 100 conference papers and industry reports regularly cited by scientists all over the world.
He described peer review as crucial.
"When you write you expect other people will look at what you're writing and check it for as much truth as they can determine from what you have written. Often it results in the publications being better," he said.
"The science community isn't one man; it's a whole community."
Dr Oddy said his "accountability", from a scientific perspective, initially came from providing a story that fitted with the facts.
"For the rest of it, it lies with providing community service. There is no point doing research if you can't turn it, in the long-run, into something people can use," he said.
"And, of course, a lot of what you do, and a lot of what others do, in the short-term won't be like that. But the accountability lies in taking as much knowledge as you have gathered and putting it into things that people can use."
"For example, that drought feeding stuff that we did in the 70s was recently turned into a free phone App. We've now done a revised version, along with an App for the Wagu Society. All we are doing is taking imbedded knowledge derived from the scientific community and making it available to those who can use it for practical purposes."
Dr Oddy said he is now part of a team working on a revision on the work he did during 1970s on drought feeding, and agreed he had gone the full circle.
"What happens is, scientists tend to chase new ideas all the time," he said.
"What we don't do is go back often enough and put them back together to revise them, so you come forward with something new again," he said.
A Livestock production expert recognised for his large body of work, including research into sheep genomics, animal nutrition, physiology and genetics in aspects of production in sheep and beef and product quality in beef, Dr Oddy now adds the PSM to his 2015 award of the NSW Premier's Prize for Science and Engineering.
