Leznoff completed his B.Sc. at York University (Toronto), concurrently studying Japanese; he spent a year on exchange at Meiji University (Tokyo) and he won several Canadian National Japanese speech competitions). He finished his Ph.D. at Univ. British Columbia (Vancouver) in 1997 with Prof. Fryzuk, and then a Post-doctoral Fellowship at CNRS Bordeaux with Prof. Olivier Kahn (the father of “Molecular Magnetism”. Leznoff joined Simon Fraser University in Vancouver Canada in 1999, and has been Professor of Chemistry since 2009.

He has published over 140 articles covering cyanometallate coordination polymers for materials applications, phthalocyanines, paramagnetic organometallic and actinide chemistry, and patents for extremely sensitive ammonia and other toxic gas sensors, and birefringent coordination polymers. He has given over 130 invited presentations worldwide, co-organized over 10 National and International conferences, and is on several Editorial Boards, including the Canadian Journal of Chemistry, Inorganics and Gold Bulletin. He was awarded the Canadian Strem Chemicals Award for Inorganic Chemistry in 2010 and is a Fellow of the Chemical Institute of Canada. He was previously an Invited Visiting Professor in Strasbourg with Prof. Jean Weiss and is spending 2019-2020 in Université Claude Bernard Lyon 1 as an Invited Visiting Professor in the group of Prof. Dominique Luneau (Laboratoire des Multimatériaux et Interfaces).