Maria Leptin (born 1954) is a German developmental biologist and immunologist, and the current president of the European Research Council.

[19] She was supervised by Fritz Melchers[20] and studied B-cell activation and maturation into plasma cells as part of the immune response to infections.

[17] After her PhD, in 1984, Leptin joined Michael Wilcox's group at the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology (LMB) in Cambridge as a postdoctoral fellow.

[24] She is also leading a research group at Cologne,[25] which initially continued her study on gastrulation,[26][27] but later shifted to the development of the Drosophila respiratory system.

[20] She also set up a research group at the European Molecular Biology Laboratory in Heidelberg, which studies the factors determining cell shape in Drosophila[30] and the in vivo imaging of innate immune response in zebrafish.