Christina S. Leslie

Education and career

Leslie was an undergraduate at the University of Waterloo in Canada, originally intending to study applied mathematics and engineering, but finishing her degree there in pure mathematics. She completed her Ph.D. in mathematics at the University of California, Berkeley, continuing her focus in pure mathematics with a dissertation in differential geometry and Lie theory, Geometric Construction of Intertwining Maps for Mixed Models of Compact Dual Pairs (1998), supervised by Joseph A. Wolf.

After postdoctoral research in mathematics at Columbia University from 1999 to 2000, she continued at Columbia as a lecturer in the Computer Science Department. It was during this time that her research interests shifted from mathematics to computational biology. She moved to the Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in 2007.