Lucas Leemann studied Political Science and Economics at the University of Bern and the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill. After a short visit at the Center for Applied Statistics at Washington University St. Louis he studied at Columbia University where he graduated with a PhD in 2014. He held the position of lecturer for quantitative methods at University College London and then joined the University of Essex as a reader. In January 2018 he joined the University of Zurich and was promoted in 2021 and is now Extraordinarius for Comparative Politics & Empirical Democracy Research.