J. Steven Leeder, PharmD, PhD, is the Marion Merrell Dow Endowed Chair in Pediatric Precision Therapeutics at Children’s Mercy Kansas City (CMKC), Kansas City, Missouri. He serves as the Interim Executive Director of the Children’s Mercy Research Institute at CMKC, and Associate Chair-Research in the Department of Pediatrics. He holds faculty appointments as Professor of Pediatrics and Pharmacology at the University of Missouri-Kansas City Schools of Medicine and Pharmacy; Courtesy Professor of Pharmaceutical Chemistry in the School of Pharmacy at the University of Kansas (Lawrence, KS); and Clinical Professor of Pediatrics at the University of Kansas Medical Center (Kansas City, KS). He is also co-PI of the Frontiers Clinical and Translational Science Institute at the University of Kansas with Dr. Mario Castro.

Dr. Leeder’s research focuses on characterizing the relative contributions of ontogeny, genetic variation, and disease to observed variability in drug disposition and response in children, encompassed within the GOLDILOKs initiative: Genomic- and Ontogeny-Linked Dose Individualization and cLinical Optimization for Kids. Dr. Leeder is strongly committed to mentoring pediatric sub-specialists, clinical pharmacists with advanced training, and other healthcare practitioners embarking on careers as independent clinical and translational investigators in the field of pediatric clinical pharmacology and precision therapeutics for children.