In August 2015 Dr. Leary retired after 10 years at Purdue University to become Professor Emeritus. In that role he continues to serve Purdue and is still very active on the national and international fronts in terms of service on NIH Study Sections and other national advisories, attends national and international scientific meetings, serves on editorial boards of multiple scientific journals. He now lives in Santa Fe, New Mexico where he has also founded a new biotech startup consulting/prototyping/invent-for-hire company "Aurora Life Technologies, LLC" with laboratories in the Santa Fe Business Incubator. As part of this LLC he has been providing scientific consulting services for national and international companies. He continues to present at scientific meetings around the world and to publish scientific papers. Recently he sole-authored the world's first textbook, Fundamentals of Nanomedicine, to be published in Spring, 2022 by Cambridge University Press.

Professor Leary moved to Purdue on July 1, 2005 and became the SVM (School of Veterinary Medicine) Endowed Professor of Nanomedicine and a tenured full professor in the Department of Basic Medical Sciences and the Weldon School of Biomedical Engineering. He is also a Member of the Bindley Biosciences Center, Birck Nanotechnology Center, and the Oncological Science at Discovery Park where his laboratories are located. He is also a Member of the Purdue Cancer Center and serves as Scientific Director of the Shared Core facility for Flow Cytometry and Cell Separation. In 2007 he was elected a Fellow of the AIMBE (American Institute for Medical and Biological Engineering), the highest honorary for biomedical engineers in the United States. He was elected an SPIE Fellow in 2010 and a BMES Fellow in 2012. He supervises graduate student dissertation research, has directed two graduate school programs, and has teached an advanced graduate level course BME 626 "Engineering Nanomedical Systems" which has been freely available as HD video, audio, and podcasts since 2011 on the NSF-funded NanoHub at Purdue University at http://nanohub.org/resources/11877 (you must manually paste this URL into your browser to get the full course site).

For the previous 10 years at the University of Texas Medical Branch at Galveston (UTMB), Dr. Leary was a tenured Professor of Internal Medicine (Division of Infectious Diseases), Pathology, Biophysics, Microbiology & Immunology, and Human Biological Chemistry & Genetics as well as an Assistant Director of the Biomedical Engineering Center, an Affiliated Senior Scientist in the Sealy Centers for Molecular Sciences, Structural Biology, Cancer Cell Biology, Vaccine Development, and the Program in Bioinformatics. He also served as Assistant Vice President of Research for Advanced Technology.

Prior to this position Dr. Leary was an Assistant and Tenured Associate Professor of Experimental Pathology at the University of Rochester Medical School for 16 years during which time he made the original invention of high-speed flow cytometry and cell sorting (resulting in 5 issued US Patents) and the development of rare-event methods now important for detection of human stem/progenitor cells and rare circulating tumor cells (CTC).

Dr. Leary's research and teaching career as a professor spans more than 37 years. His original training includes an aerospace engineering degree from M.I.T., a Masters degree in space physics from the University of New Hampshire, a Ph.D. in Biophysics from Penn State University, and a postdoctoral fellowship at Los Alamos National Laboratory in cytometry and immunology. He has served as a PI or Co-PI of multiple NIH R01 grants for more than 25 years, in addition to being a co-investigator on numerous other NIH grants. His research has also been funded by the NSF, DOD, USDA, and a number of private foundations and companies. He is the holder of 9 issued U.S. Patents, with 6 currently pending and is the author or co-author of more than 160 papers and book chapters in the fields of high-throughput technologies, minimal residual disease monitoring, developmental immunology, cancer research, and nanomedicine. He is the original inventor of high-speed flow cytometry and rare-event analysis techniques. Dr. Leary has served on numerous national expert review panels for more than 30 years. He is a frequently invited speaker and he and his lab group have given more than 240 invited presentations at national and international scientific conferences. He has served on 40 Ph.D. committees in 9 department or interdisciplinary programs at Purdue since 2005, and has served as PhD mentor to 8 PhD students and 1 MS student, all successfully launched into their careers. He also chaired two graduate programs for a number of years at Purdue.

His research career spans three general areas: (1) development of high-throughput single-cell flow cytometry and cell sorting tecnologies and rare-event methods, (2) BioMEMS technologies including miniaturized cell sorters and portable devices for detection of microbial pathogens in food and water, and artificial human "organ-on-a-chip" technologies, and (3) development of smart nano-engineered systems for single-cell drug/gene delivery for nanomedicine.

Last updated: January 5, 2022