Odesa I. I. Mechnykov National University, often referred to as Odesa National University, located in Odesa, Ukraine, is one of the country's major universities, named after the scientist Élie Metchnikoff, a Nobel prizewinner in 1908. The university was founded in 1865 by an edict of Tsar Alexander II of Russia, which reorganized the Richelieu Lyceum of Odesa into the new Imperial Novorossiya University. In the Soviet era, the university was renamed Odesa I. I. Mechnykov State University.

Ilya Ilyich Mechnikov, also spelled Élie Metchnikoff, was a zoologist from the Russian Empire of Moldavian noble ancestry best known for his pioneering research in immunology and thanatology. He and Paul Ehrlich were jointly awarded the 1908 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine "in recognition of their work on immunity".