Dr. Leone received his B.A. in Chemistry at Northwestern University in 1970 and his Ph.D. in Chemistry at the University of California at Berkeley with Professor C. Bradley Moore in 1974. He was an assistant professor at the University of Southern California from 1974-76. He assumed a position with NIST and the University of Colorado in 1976 and became a full professor in 1982. Dr. Leone was a Fellow and staff member of the National Institute of Standards and Technology, a Fellow of JILA, as well as an Adjoint Professor of Chemistry and Biochemistry and a Lecturer of Physics at the University of Colorado. In 2002, he became Professor of Physics and Chemistry, University of California, Berkeley, director of the chemical dynamics beamline at the Advanced Light Source, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, and John R. Thomas Endowed Chair in Physical Chemistry. He is Director of the Chemical Sciences Division at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.

His numerous honors and awards include Fellow, American Physical Society, Optical Society of America, and American Association for the Advancement of Science; Alfred P. Sloan Fellow (1977-81); Department of Commerce Silver Medal Award (1980); American Chemical Society Pure Chemistry Award (1982); American Chemical Society Nobel Laureate Signature Award for Graduate Education in Chemistry, jointly with D.J. Nesbitt and J.T. Hynes (1983); Coblentz Award for Spectroscopy (1984); Department of Commerce Gold Medal Award (1984); Arthur S. Flemming Award for Government Service (1986); Fellowship, Japanese Society for the Promotion of Science (1986); John Simon Guggenheim Fellow (1988); Herbert P. Broida Prize of the American Physical Society (1989); Visiting Miller Research Professor to the University of California, Berkeley (1990); Visiting Professor at the Chemistry Research Promotion Center, Taiwan (1992); Samuel Wesley Stratton Award from the National Institute of Standards and Technology (1992); Bourke Medal of the Faraday Division of the Royal Society of Chemistry (1995); Member of the National Academy of Sciences (1995); Centennial Speaker, American Physical Society (1999); and Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (2000); American Chemical Society, Peter Debye Award (2005);  Morris Belkin Visiting Professorship, Weizmann Institute (2009); Polanyi Medal of the Gas Kinetics Division of the Royal Society of Chemistry, UK (2010); Miller Professorship, Miller Research Institute (2010); National Security Science and Engineering Faculty Fellowship, Department of Defense (2010); John R. Thomas Endowed Chair in Physical Chemistry, 2010; Irving Langmuir Prize in Chemical Physics, American Physical Society, 2011; Distinguished Schulich Lectureship Award, Technion – Israel Institute of Technology, 2011; Chemical Society Reviews Lecture Award, Royal Society of Chemistry, 2011