After receiving his B.A. at Northwestern University and Ph.D. at UC Berkeley, Leone was an assistant professor at the University of Southern California, after which he assumed a position with the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) and the University of Colorado, becoming a full professor in 1982. Leone was a fellow and staff member of NIST, a fellow of JILA, as well as an adjunct professor of chemistry and biochemistry and a lecturer of physics at the University of Colorado.
In 2002, he became a professor of chemistry and physics at UC Berkeley and director of the Chemical Dynamics Beamline at the Lab’s Advanced Light Source. Leone was chair of the committee that encouraged the Department of Energy to build the Linac Coherent Light Source at Stanford University, and he was instrumental in formulations with the Lab’s Accelerator and Fusion Research Division on analysis of short pulse x-ray accelerator systems.
Leone’s current projects are grouped along several main themes: ultrafast laser investigations using soft x-ray probing of valence and core levels, production of attosecond pulses and their utilization for dynamics in physics and chemistry, state-resolved collision processes and kinetics investigations, coherent processes and wave packets, and the dynamics of nanoparticles and nanoscale imaging.
Leone is the author of more than 500 papers, book chapters, review articles, and four patents. His numerous awards include the Irving Langmuir Prize in Chemical Physics (2011), National Security Science and Engineering Faculty Fellowship, Department of Defense (2010), Polanyi Medal of the Gas Kinetics Division of the Royal Society of Chemistry, UK (2010), American Chemical Society Peter Debye Prize (2005), member of the National Academy of Sciences (1995), Department of Commerce Gold Medal (1984), and American Chemical Society Pure Chemistry Award (1982).
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