Professor Leonel's work spans a wide spectrum of dynamical systems using a comprehensive scaling approach to investigate local and global bifurcations of maps and ordinary differential equations and showing the existence of universality classes. His contributions extend to understanding diffusion phenomena in billiards and developing strategies to mitigate the unbounded energy growth in driven Hamiltonian systems known as Fermi acceleration. Professor Leonel's leadership and scholarly achievements were recognized in 2023 when he received the Afraimovich Award at the Nonlinear Systems and Complexity conference held in Istanbul.

Professor Leonel obtained his PhD in 2003. He has published 164 journal articles and 4 books, and is based at the Rio Clara campus of UNESP (state university of São Paulo), Brazil.