Leslie grew up in a small town in Mexico called Uruapan, Michoacán. She moved to the United States when she was 16 years old. She attended Los Angeles Southwest College before transferring to the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), where she received her Bachelor of Science in Biology. As an undergraduate, she joined the Kruglyak Lab, where she performed genetic mapping in crosses between highly diverse yeast strains to study how DNA sequence variants affect yeast growth under different conditions. After she graduated, she continued working in the Kruglyak Lab as a laboratory technician, building an ultra-high-throughput CRISPR/Cas9-based editing toolkit for yeast, with the goal of transforming our understanding of the genetic underpinnings of traits.
In 2025, Leslie moved to Seattle to join the Molecular and Cellular Biology PhD Program at the University of Washington. She joined the Malik Lab in September 2026, where she will be working with Maria Toro Moreno on a Deep Mutational Scanning (DMS) and evolutionary origins project.
Outside the lab, Leslie likes to read, travel, hike, learn new hobbies, and try new coffee and matcha spots.