Leslie Leinwand, PhD

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 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. More recently, she was a co-founder of Hiberna, Inc, and of MyoKardia, Inc., a company founded to develop therapeutics for inherited cardiomyopathies. MyoKardia was acquired in 2020 by Bristol Myers Squibb.

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 for Inventors.  She has been honored by the American Heart Association with its Distinguished Scientist Award and its Braunwald Academic Mentorship Award.

The interests of Dr. Leinwand’s laboratory are the genetics and molecular physiology of inherited diseases of the heart and particularly how biologic sex affects the heart in health and disease. The study of these diseases has required multidisciplinary approaches, involving molecular biology, mouse genetics, mouse cardiac physiology, and the analysis of human tissues. She has also studied the biology of the Burmese python to uncover cardio-protective mechanisms.