Mark Leake

Mark Leake is a physicist by training, addressing challenging biophysical and biochemical questions in a range of biological processes. He gained his biophysics PhD on muscle proteins using optical tweezers in King’s College London, later postdoctoral positions in Oxford and Heidelberg, and independence as a Royal Society URF in Oxford, leading research in single-molecule biophysics, prior to becoming Anniversary Chair of Biological Physics at the University of York in 2013. Mark was Director-Founder of the Biological Physical Sciences Institute and is Coordinator of the Physics of Life Group in the University of York and Chair of the UK Physics of Life network PoLNET. His research involves developing new biophysical instrumentation for addressing open biological questions, and coupling these to molecular biology/biochemistry to investigate single biomolecules under physiologically relevant environments, most recently applied to a range of biomolecular condensates driven by liquid-liquid phase separation.