Laurence Leherte

After the defense of her PhD thesis, Dr./Prof. Laurence Leherte spent a one-year post-doctoral stay at the Queen’s University (Kingston, ONT, Canada) with Professor Suzanne Fortier (laboratory of Crystallography, Chemistry) and Professor Janice Glasgow (laboratory of Imagery, Computing Science) working on a collaborative project entitled “Molecular Scene Analysis” involving the Cambridge Structural Data Centre (Dr. Franck Allen). Then, she spent three months at the CSDC in Cambridge (UK) and another 6-month stay in Kingston.

In 1993, she returned to the University of Namur to work in the laboratory of Computational Physical Chemistry (Dir. Prof. D. Vercauteren) where she developed original research on the topological analysis of electron density distributions at various levels of resolution, with applications to molecular similarity and complementarity, as well as to molecular dynamics of protein systems. At the same time, she was professor assistant in General Chemistry, Physical Chemistry, and Molecular Modelling.

She got a permanent position in Namur in 1998. In 2018, she moved to the laboratory of Structural Biological Chemistry (Dir. Prof. Johan Wouters) where she is working on the application of electron density analysis tools to the study of molecular interactions in crystal structures, as well as on Molecular Dynamics simulations of proteins and host-guest systems.

She is  a member of the Namur Institute of Structured Matter (NISM), the Namur Research Institute for Life Sciences (NARILIS), and the Namur Medicine and Drug Innovation Center (NAMEDIC).