Eric Alm earned his Bachelors from the University of Illinois (Champaign-Urbana), his Masters from the University of California (Riverside), and his PhD from the University of Washington (Seattle).

He held a postdoctoral appointment at the University of California (Berkeley) and Lawrence Berkeley National Lab before joining the faculty at MIT. His research group is an interdisciplinary team of computer scientists, computational biologists, molecular biologists, and microbial ecologists.