Leonard Deepak Francis is the group leader of the Nanostructured Materials Group at the International Iberian Nanotechnology Laboratory (INL). His broad area of research is focused on using advanced electron microscopic techniques for the study of materials/nanomaterials for various applications and in the study of fundamental physical phenomena and dynamics at the nanoscale.

Leonard received his PhD in 2005 from the Jawaharlal Nehru Centre for Advanced Scientific Research, Bangalore, India, working with Prof. C.N.R.Rao. Subsequently, he was a postdoctoral fellow (2006–2008) with Prof. Reshef Tenne at the Weizmann Institute of Science, Israel. Thereafter, he was a postdoctoral fellow (209-2011) working with Prof. Miguel Jose-Yacaman at the University of Texas before moving to INL.

He has published over 125 papers and 8 review articles in major international journals. In addition, he has three book chapters. Several of his articles have made it to the cover pages of journals.

He has also served as the guest editor for a special issue of the Journal of Nano Materials: Nanomaterial Properties: Size and Shape Dependencies, and more recently, Nanomaterials—for the Special Issue “An Overview of the Recent Advances in Advanced Electron Microscopy Imaging, Spectroscopy and Their Related Applications.”

Leonard is a member of various societies, including the Royal Society of Chemistry (RSC), the American Chemical Society (ACS), and the Portuguese Microscopy Society (SPM), of which he is the current secretary.

He has participated in two major European projects, NANOHVAC and NANoReg, several regional projects, and several national projects (funded by the Portuguese Science Foundation: Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia (FCT) and the ERDF through COMPETE2020). He is currently involved in the Horizon Europe Project, FUNLAYERS, and the PRR Projects, New Generation Storage (NGS) and Moving to Neutrality (M2N).

In addition, he is an acting referee for various ACS, RSC, Wiley and Elsevier journals, and Nature, among others.

Most recently, he has edited two books entitled “Advanced Transmission Electron Microscopy – Applications to Nanomaterials” – Springer (2015) and “Metal Nanoparticles and Clusters: Advances in Synthesis, Properties and Applications” – Springer (2018).

He is also a Fellow of the International Association of Advanced Materials.

He also holds 3 joint patents.

Currently, he has a h-index of 34.