Rate My Professor Leonidas Bleris

Leonidas Bleris is a Professor of Bioengineering, Fellow, and Associate Department Head for Graduate Studies in the Bioengineering Department at The University of Texas at Dallas, where he also holds the Texas Instruments Bioengineering Chair in the Erik Jonsson School of Engineering and Computer Science. He earned a PhD in Electrical Engineering from Lehigh University in 2006, an MS in Electrical and Computer Engineering from Lehigh University in 2002, and a Diploma in Electrical and Computer Engineering from Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, Greece, in 2000. Following his doctoral studies, Bleris completed a postdoctoral fellowship at the FAS Center for Systems Biology at Harvard University and served as a visiting scientist there from 2009 to 2010. Prior roles include serving as an Independent Expert for the European Commission under the Science, Economy and Society directorate since 2008 and as the University of Texas at Dallas representative for the 2011-2012 Tuning Oversight Council for Engineering and Science, Committee on Bioengineering. Before joining UT Dallas, he was a postdoctoral fellow at Harvard's FAS Center for Systems Biology.

Bleris's research centers on systems biology, mammalian synthetic biology, and genome editing, with investigations into genetic circuits that process information in human cells, biological networks, cellular noise, and controlled gene delivery mechanisms. His lab employs top-down decomposition and bottom-up synthesis strategies to address complex problems at the biology-engineering interface. Research has garnered support from the National Institutes of Health and the National Science Foundation, including the NSF Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) Award in 2014. He received the 2014 Junior Faculty Research Award from the Erik Jonsson School of Engineering and Computer Science and the Christine Mirzayan Science and Technology Policy Graduate Fellowship from the National Academy of Sciences. Publications appear in high-impact journals such as Nature Biotechnology, Nature Nanotechnology, Molecular Systems Biology, and Nucleic Acids Research. Key works include 'A universal RNAi-based logic evaluator that operates in mammalian cells' (Nature Biotechnology, 2007), 'Synthetic incoherent feedforward circuits show adaptation to the amount of their genetic template' (Molecular Systems Biology, 2011), and 'Guide RNA engineering for versatile Cas9 functionality' (Nucleic Acids Research, 2016). His contributions advance technologies for engineered cell protection and RNA-based intercellular communication.