Leslie is Professor Emerita of Public Health (Health Policy and Management) at the Yale School of Public Health. She also has a secondary position as Professor of Management at the Yale School of Management, a courtesy position as Professor in the Jackson School of Global Affairs, and serves as Core Faculty at the Yale Global Health Leadership Initiative and Lecturer at Yale College. She is especially interested in the scale up of innovative, evidence-based practices, programs, and policies to address health inequities and bring 30 years of expertise in implementation science and mixed methods to these questions. Together with colleagues Bradley and Krumholz, she developed a ‘positive deviance’ approach to study hospital care (which has been highly influential in academic journals) and has also applied this method in studies on medical and social care integration. She also co-led the development of a novel model of scale up of innovations commissioned by the Gates Foundation, the AIDED Model of Diffusion. Her work has been published in some of the most prestigious academic journals and featured in The New York Times, Wall Street Journal, NPR and ABC News. She has been engaged in teaching and mentoring physicians at the pre-medical undergraduate, graduate, and postgraduate levels since 1993 and is passionate about supporting the next generation of scholars and teachers. She is grateful to her own mentors from UConn, Steven Wisensale and Thomas Blank.
Leslie’s current primary research portfolio includes projects addressing structural racism and drive measurable reductions in inequities in sepsis outcomes, preparing ICU leadership in Australia and New Zealand to drive transformation in clinical performance and collaborations to increase diversity in the biomedical workforce.
Leslie lives in Killingworth, CT with a menagerie of animals, courtesy of her very persuasive daughters, now 23 and 25 and living elsewhere, while she continues to muck the stalls!