Wilmer Leal
Wilmer Leal was a postdoctoral researcher in the Computer Science Department at the University of Florida. Since January 2026 he has been a research scientist in the university’s Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering.
He is fascinated by the interplay between chemistry and mathematics, leveraging mathematical tools to solve chemical questions and using chemical intuition to inspire mathematical insights. His research revolves around developing categorical models for various flavors of compositionality in chemistry. As a chemist, he is naturally inclined to reason and navigate through reaction networks, which makes hypernetworks a particularly exciting area of study for him.
Prior to joining the University of Florida, he pursued his PhD in the Bioinformatics Group at the University of Leipzig and the Max Planck Institute for Mathematics in the Sciences, Germany. There he explored both mathematical structures and vast chemical databases. This enabled him to delve into the depths of chemical space, uncovering its secrets and unraveling the intricate history of chemistry.
His goal is to advance our understanding of the rich interplay between chemistry, mathematics, computer science and history of science.
Selected publications
- Towards a Unified Theory of Time-Varying Data – Applied Categorical Structures, 2026. Benjamin Merlin Bumpus, Wilmer Leal, James Fairbanks, Martti Karvonen, Frédéric Simard. DOI: 10.1007/s10485-026-09860-4
- Dialectica Petri Nets – Fundamenta Informaticae, 2025. Elena Di Lavore, Wilmer Leal, Valeria de Paiva. DOI: 10.46298/fi.13125
- Diachronic data analysis supports and refines conceptual metaphor theory – PLOS Complex Systems, 2025. Marie Teich, Wilmer Leal, Jürgen Jost. DOI: 10.1371/journal.pcsy.0000058
- The expansion of chemical space in 1826 and in the 1840s prompted the convergence to the periodic system – Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 2022. Wilmer Leal, Eugenio J. Llanos, Andrés Bernal, Peter F. Stadler, Jürgen Jost, Guillermo Restrepo. DOI: 10.1073/pnas.2119083119
- Formal structure of periodic system of elements – Proceedings of the Royal Society A, 2019. Wilmer Leal, Guillermo Restrepo. DOI: 10.1098/rspa.2018.0581
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