Leon received his PhD from the Integrative Sciences and Engineering program at National University of Singapore, where his research focused on the molecular mechanisms of stress resistance in bats. He pioneered in vivo studies on rewired heat shock responses and mitochondrial adaptations for flight, while establishing novel bioinformatic pipelines for cross-species comparative transcriptomics and engineering bespoke monoclonal antibodies using V(D)J single-cell sequencing. During his doctoral studies, his work was supported by the prestigious President’s Graduate Fellowship (Singapore).
Now, he is currently a Postdoctoral Fellow in the Lehner Lab at the Wellcome Sanger Institute, where he contributes to the Generative and Synthetic Genomics program. His research leverages biological programming to solve de novo antibody design by integrating large-scale mutagenesis, generative models, and synthetic genomics. At the core of his work is the ambition to decipher the “rules” of sequence-to-binding-function.