Dr. Leok received his Ph.D. from Caltech in 2004. He held a Hildebrandt Research Assistant Professorship at Michigan during 2004-2006, and has since been an assistant professor at Purdue, prior to joining UCSD in 2009. Dr. Leok's research is on computational geometric mechanics, which is an area of computational and applied mathematics with increasingly important applications to modern science and engineering. Dr. Leok's work uses a synthesis of differential geometric and numerical analysis techniques to provide long-time solutions to differential equations that are stable and robust, and thus provide methods for modeling and controlling modern engineering systems.

Dr. Leok is the author of 28 research articles. He has been awarded two individual investigator grants and a prestigious CAREER award from the National Science Foundation; he won a Leslie Fox Prize in Numerical Analysis and a SIAM Student Paper Prize in 2004 and the SciCADE New Talent Prize in 2007. He serves on the editorial boards of two research journals. Dr. Leok in an excellent teacher at the undergraduate and graduate levels, and has successfully mentored graduate students and postdoctoral scholars. At UCSD, Dr. Leok will teach courses ranging from lower-division calculus courses, to upper-division courses and research-level graduate courses in computational mathematics.