Leslie Leinwand

Leslie Leinwand, PhD is a Molecular, Cellular, and Developmental Biology (MCDB)
Distinguished Professor and the Chief Scientific Officer of the BioFrontiers Institute at
the University of Colorado Boulder. She was recruited to be Chair of MCDB in 1995. She
received her Bachelor’s degree from Cornell University, her PhD from Yale University
and did post-doctoral training at Rockefeller University. She joined the faculty at Albert
Einstein College of Medicine in New York in 1981 and remained there until moving to
Colorado in 1995. She co-founded Myogen, Inc. which was sold to Gilead
Pharmaceuticals. She was also a co-founder of Hiberna, Inc, and more recently of
MyoKardia, Inc, a publicly traded company founded to develop therapeutics for
inherited cardiomyopathies. She is a Fellow of the AAAS, former MERIT Awardee of the
NIH, Established Investigator of the American Heart Association and was recently
elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the National Academy of
Inventors. The interests of Dr. Leinwand’s laboratory are the genetics and molecular
physiology of inherited diseases of the heart and how gender and diet modify the heart.
The study of these diseases has required multidisciplinary approaches, involving
molecular biology, mouse genetics, mouse cardiac physiology, and the analysis of
human tissues. Her teaching was recognized by funding from the Howard Hughes
Medical Institute’s Professor Program.