Leo was a double major in mathematics and computer science at MIT and obtained his PhD from Cambridge.  He was a postdoc in Toronto, Heidelberg and Stanford before starting on the faculty at the Wellcome Sanger Institute, Cambridge, in 2015.  

At Sanger, Leo’s group led the way in developing and applying methods to generate large scale, combinatorial variation of human genomes, coupled to diverse measurement of the consequences of variation, as a route to generating increasingly predictive models of genome function.  

At GBI, Leo’s work centres on mutating, scrambling, deleting and grafting DNA, thereby generating data that is used to train predictive and generative models for making synthetic sequences useful in animals and plants.