Lauribeth Leonelli was a postdoctoral researcher in Kris Niyogi's lab at the University of California, Berkeley, where her research focused on improving carbon fixation and enhancing plant productivity. During her tenure in the lab, she engineered a novel lutein-based energy dissipation cycle into Arabidopsis. She also identified and characterized carotenoid biosynthesis and photosynthesis genes from non-model organisms in surrogate systems. Since her departure from the RIPE project, she has gone on to work as an Associate Research Scientist at the NYU Center for Data Science.