Dr. Leung is an Associate Professor of Dermatology with an active clinical practice at the University of Pennsylvania and the Philadelphia VA. He went to college at Stanford University and received his MD/PhD from the UCLA-Caltech MSTP program. As a graduate student with Nobelist David Baltimore, he studied gene regulation and NF-kB signaling.

His own lab consists of biologists, clinicians, and computational scientists working together to study how skin and other organs respond to injury and inflammation, with the ultimate goal of improving patient outcomes. They focus on understanding the molecular drivers of scar formation, unraveling the mechanisms driving skin diseases, identifying prognostic and predictive biomarkers to improve clinical diagnosis, and discovering new treatments to enable personalized medicine.

He serves as Director of the Research residency track, which has become one of the largest and most successful in the country. They have graduated 3 trainees into tenure-track assistant professor positions in the past 5 years. He has a long-standing interest in mentorship and career development for graduate students, physician-scientists, and post-doctoral fellows. He also serves as a Core Director for the Skin Translation Core within the NIH-funded Skin Biology Disease Resource Center (SBDRC) at Penn.

Thomas has won numerous awards, including election into ASCI, the Montague Award given by the Penn School of Medicine for an outstanding mid-career investigator, and the Young Investigator award from the American Academy of Dermatology.