Research interests: 

Leo has used ideas from energy landscape theory and the physics of disordered systems to understand the organization of adaptive immune defenses across sequence space. His work has shown that the genetic recombination machinery leads to highly correlated probabilities of generating similar sequences. These correlations are further amplified by selection, which is largely universal. These results help understand the observed clustering of some receptor sequences despite their enormous diversity and they provide a baseline for the further study of repertoire architecture.