Stephen Leone
Stephen Robert Leone is an American chemist and the John R. Thomas Endowed Chair in Physical Chemistry at the University of California, Berkeley.
Leone was born in Queens, New York City on May 19, 1948, of Italian descent. The family moved to Rochester, New Hampshire, and later Batavia, Illinois, where Stephen attended primary and secondary school. Leone earned a bachelor's degree from Northwestern University and spent a summer working at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory prior to attending the University of California, Berkeley for graduate study. In 1974, Leone began teaching at the University of Southern California, and later moved to JILA, a research institute at the University of Colorado Boulder. Leone returned to Berkeley in 2002.
Over the course of his career, Leone has received the ACS Award in Pure Chemistry and Peter Debye Award from the American Chemical Society, the Bourke Award and Polanyi Medal from the Royal Society of Chemistry and the Herbert P. Broida Prize of the American Physical Society, among several others. He has been awarded Sloan and Guggenheim fellowships, and was elected a member of the United States National Academy of Sciences in 1995.
