Leslie Salas-Hernández is Senior Research Associate for the Science and Triage Response Teams. Leslie is a trained public health researcher, and her dissertation centered on police violence. As part of Leslie's dissertation, she externally evaluated a consent decree-mandated training at one of the largest police departments in the nation. Before graduate school, Leslie worked at a community mental health center.

Leslie received her Ph.D. and MPH from Emory University's Rollins School of Public Health. She is an alumna of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation's Health Policy Research Scholars (HPRS) program. She also holds two Bachelor's degrees in public health and Chicano studies from the University of California, Berkeley.