Leslie Gilliard-AbdulAziz

Biography

Dr. Kandis Leslie Gilliard-AbdulAziz directs the Sustainable Lab, which primarily focuses on developing novel materials for sustainable catalytic processes for low-carbon chemical production. Her primary research focus is novel materials development for CO2 sequestration and utilization using an interdisciplinary toolset from chemistry, material science, chemical, and environmental engineering. Dr. Gilliard-AbdulAziz is an incoming Gabilan Assistant Professor in the Sonny Astani Civil and Environmental Engineering department at the University of Southern California. Before joining USC, she directed the Sustainable Lab at the University of California, Riverside, between 2018 – 2023. She earned her Ph.D. in Chemistry from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and was a Provost postdoctoral fellow at the University of Pennsylvania. She worked previously as a Forensic scientist for the Philadelphia police department and as a Refinery chemist at Sunoco Chemicals in Philadelphia.