Professor Leake’s expertise is in photonics, electronics, material science, and microfluidics. She has extensive experience with simulations, experimentation and data analysis in those fields. She holds a PhD. In Electrical Engineering from the University of California, Santa Cruz as well as undergraduate degrees in Engineering Science and Physics from Sweet Briar College.
She particularly enjoys working with students on multidisciplinary projects. This includes having students design and build low cost, microcontroller based, scientific devices. She’s worked with students to design and fabricate robots and measurement systems, including several environmental sensor systems. These systems are designed to be cheap, adaptable, and make things easier for the users. These projects are done in class as well as outside the classroom with undergraduate research students.
Her current photonics research focuses on developing a patterning process for nanofilms produced using a layer-by-layer technique. These nanofilms are fabricated with a student designed robot and can be used for a wide array of interesting tasks. One area of interest is producing waveguides to serve as the basis for sensing. This project is multidisciplinary and allows students to design experiments, work with lasers, optics, and nanofabrication.
Research:
Chapter, Planar Optofluidics for On-Chip Particle Manipulation in Biomedical Optical Sensors: Differentiators for Winning Technologies