Lea de Jong was born in Alkmaar (The Netherlands) in 1998 and is currently a Ph.D. student in Molecular Science at Università degli Studi di Padova. She obtained both her B.Sc. (2021) and her master’s (2024) degrees from the Vrije Universiteit (VU) Amsterdam and the Universiteit van Amsterdam (UvA), where she also completed a major in Science Communication. She started her Ph.D. in 2024 under the supervision of Prof. Laura Orian. Her research focuses on the mechanistic study of nucleophilic substitution and elimination reactions using computational chemistry, focussing on solvent effects in reaction mechanisms.