Leonie obtained her MSc degree in Molecular Life Sciences with a specialization in Physical Chemistry from Wageningen University & Research (the Netherlands) in 2012. After an industrial traineeship at CSIRO (Clayton, Australia) she continued with her PhD in the Department of Chemical Engineering at The University of Melbourne. She received the 2017 ANSTO, Australian Synchrotron Stephen Wilkins Medal for her PhD thesis entitled “Improving success rates for in meso crystallization using integral membrane proteins and membrane protein mimetics in the bicontinuous cubic phase”. Leonie was a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at ETH Zurich (Switzerland) for several years where she worked on a World food system center research project regarding the preservation of African leafy vegetables and a commercial project on the self-assembly of organic/inorganic colloidal hybrids. She started as a Lecturer and set up the Hybrid Assembly Group at Monash University in October 2019.

Leonie uses a unique combination of physical chemistry, chemical engineering, biochemistry and cell biology approaches in her research, and applies it to pharmaceutical and food sciences. The Hybrid Assembly Group focusses on understanding soft material (nano-) structure-property relationships using advanced scattering and microscopy techniques to improve production/processing.

Research projects, including honours and PhD projects, on self-assembly materials for pharmaceutical applications and structure - property relationships of food materials are available.