Christina Leslie did her undergraduate degree in Pure and Applied Mathematics at the University of Waterloo in Canada. She was awarded an NSERC 1967 Science and Engineering Fellowship for graduate study and did a PhD in Mathematics at the University of California, Berkeley, where her thesis work dealt with differential geometry and representation theory. She won an NSERC Postdoctoral Fellowship and did her postdoctoral training in the Mathematics Department at Columbia University in 1999-2000. She then joined the faculty of the Computer Science Department and later the Center for Computational Learning Systems at Columbia University and began to work in computational biology and machine learning. In 2007, she moved to Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, where she is currently Member of the Computational and Systems Biology Program. Dr. Leslie's research group uses computational methods to study the regulation of gene expression in mammalian cells and the dysregulation of expression programs in cancer. She is well known for developing machine learning approaches for analysis of epigenomic and transcriptomic data. Focus areas in the lab include dissecting transcriptional and epigenetic programs in differentiation, microRNA-mediated gene regulation, alternative cleavage and polyadenylation, and integrative analysis of tumor data sets.