As Vice President and Chief Scientific Officer, Leslie Vosshall directs HHMI’s portfolio of biomedical research programs. This comprises HHMI’s Investigator Program, which employs hundreds of leading researchers at institutions across the United States, the Freeman Hrabowski Scholars and Hanna H. Gray Fellows Programs that support early career scientists with the goal of enhancing inclusion in science, and ongoing initiatives to support healthy lab climates by fostering inclusive mentoring.

Vosshall is Robin Chemers Neustein Professor and head of the Laboratory of Neurogenetics and Behavior at The Rockefeller University. She has been a faculty member at Rockefeller since 2000 and an HHMI Investigator since 2008. From 2016 to 2021, she directed Rockefeller’s Kavli Neural Systems Institute.

A leader in the field of molecular neurobiology, with particular emphasis on the sense of smell and how it guides complex behavior, Vosshall and her team have established the Aedes aegypti mosquito as a genetic model organism for neurobiology, resequencing and editing the species’ genome, investigating how mosquitoes hunt their human hosts, and designing small molecules to block mosquito biting behavior. Vosshall’s groundbreaking research holds promise for combating the spread of yellow fever, dengue, Zika, and other emerging viruses transmitted by female mosquitoes. She continues to maintain her research laboratory.

Vosshall is a vocal proponent for open science and open access in scientific publishing, including the use of preprints to disseminate new discoveries. She serves on the board of the preprint server bioRxiv. 

Vosshall earned a PhD in molecular genetics from The Rockefeller University and an AB in biochemistry from Columbia University.