Dr. Orkin received his MD from Harvard Medical School. He completed postdoctoral research at the National Institutes of Health and clinical training in pediatrics and hematology-oncology at Boston Children's Hospital and Dana Farber Cancer Institute.

He is a Howard Hughes Medical Institute Investigator as well as a member of the Institute of Medicine, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the National Academy of Sciences. He has received the Warren Alpert Foundation Prize, the Dameshek Award from the American Society of Hematology, and the 2005 Distinguished Research Award of AAMC.