Dr. Leszczynski recognized early in his career that successful mentoring was integral to an effective research program. Developing a strategy to not only attract, but retain students was important to his and student needs. He led the expansion of the Computational Chemistry Department at Jackson State University. The Ph.D. program was created and Dr. Leszczynski led the development of formal and informal mentoring programs. Currently, Dr. Leszczynski leads an internationally recognized Computational Chemistry Department and has provided opportunities for Ph.D. candidates to participate in international labs.
Dr. Leszczynski has developed and promoted underrepresented students in Computational Chemistry, an area of STEM where very few such students currently participate. Over an eight year period, Dr. Leszczynski developed a number of formal programs and mentoring techniques that resulted in increase of African American and female students trained in computational chemistry methods. During this time, the department's Ph.D. program was developed and has grown to enroll approximately 50 students, more than 50% being African American. Seven of these students have already defended their Ph.D. theses while ten more are being mentored directly by him. He has also developed a Summer Institute program serving 110 students and ten faculty members, mostly from HBCUs. He developed a two conference series that brought over 2000 participants to JSU, including four Nobel Laureates. Dr. Leszczynski's activities stimulate the interest of undergraduate students in pursuing graduate education in the field of science. Research collaboration and training of undergraduate students has been originated for Tougaloo College, an HBCU institution in Jackson, and for Universidad Metropolitana in San Juan. Three Ph.D. students from Dr. Leszczynski's group had been selected to participate in the meetings of Nobel Laureates in Lindau, Germany.
