Leslie Salas-Hernández is a Senior Research Associate at the Center for Policing Equity. 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 using mixed-methods. Before graduate school, Leslie worked at a community mental health center.

Leslie received her Ph.D. and M.P.H. from Emory University's Rollins School of Public Health. She holds a B.A. in Public Health and Chicano Studies from the University of California, Berkeley. She is an alumna of the Bill and Melinda Gates Millennium Scholar (GMS) Program and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation's Health Policy Research Scholars (HPRS) program.