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Luis León
In the backyard of his El Centro, California, home, 7-year-old Luis León spotted a dead grasshopper. Curious about what enabled such small insects to jump so high, he raced inside to grab a box of toothpicks from the kitchen cabinet. León soon realized that toothpicks were not the most efficient dissecting tools. But he’d had fun trying—and discovered that grasshoppers have wings.
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Luis León
Harvard University
Cambridge, Massachusetts
Research Field: Immunology
Photo: Kathleen Dooher
A high-resolution photograph is available on request.
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Inspired by such everyday discoveries, León, now 24, gravitated naturally toward science and engineering in school. As a biochemistry major at the University of Washington in Seattle, he became an HHMI undergraduate researcher, studying insulin-like growth factors at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center. León credits the project with teaching him to be creative, resourceful, and independent.
Eager for more time at the lab bench, León spent the summer after graduation in HHMI’s Exceptional Research Opportunities Program (EXROP), which provides disadvantaged students, including underrepresented minorities, the chance to do summer research in the labs of HHMI investigators or HHMI professors. He did his EXROP research in HHMI investigator Robert Siliciano’s lab at The Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine. There, León conducted an RNA assay to quantify the transcriptional activity of an HIV-infected cell during the virus’s asymptomatic latent phase.
“The project proved to be a difficult one,” Siliciano recalls. “Nevertheless, Luis demonstrated considerable experimental skill and dedication. He would read journal articles in his downtime to try and learn more about the field.”
Over his EXROP summer, León realized the importance of other scientific traits: patience and persistence. “More than half the time in science, your results will be fuzzy and inconclusive,” he says. “Only patience and persistence will lead to good, well-founded results.”
This fall, León begins his third year of graduate school, working toward a Ph.D. in immunology at Harvard University. He is studying the role of lipoproteins in an immune response—specifically, how apolipoproteins help immune cells capture and internalize antigens.
He calls Harvard the perfect graduate school for him. “I can’t imagine any place other than Harvard that has over 80 faculty members in its immunology program,” León says. “Here, immunology rubs elbows with neuroscience, metabolic research, and much more.”
León counts running and music—he plays the viola—among his hobbies, though graduate school leaves little spare time. Eventually, he hopes to return to the West Coast to run his own lab, preferably at a large university.
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