In 2001, Leroi was appointed lecturer at
Imperial College, London. He has written several books, including
Mutants: On Genetic Variety and the Human Body. In 2004 he adapted his book into a television documentary series for Britain's
Channel 4 entitled
Human Mutants. Leroi has presented two other TV documentary series for Channel 4:
Alien Worlds (titled
Extraterrestrial outside the UK) in 2005, and
What Makes Us Human in 2006. Despite his TV appearances, Leroi has expressed scepticism about the truthfulness of television creatives. In an email exchange with TV director
Martin Durkin, concerning the latter's documentary
The Great Global Warming Swindle, Leroi wrote: "left to their own devices, TV producers simply cannot be trusted to tell the truth". He is also known as one of the first testers of the
beneficial acclimation hypothesis. In 2005, Leroi published an article in
The New York Times entitled "A Family Tree in Every Gene", which argued for the usefulness of racial types in medical genetics. In January 2009 Leroi presented the BBC4 documentary ''
What Darwin Didn't Know, which charts the progress in the field of Evolutionary Theory since the original publication of On the Origin of Species'' in 1859. In January 2010 Leroi presented the BBC4 documentary ''Aristotle's Lagoon'', filmed on the Greek island of
Lesbos and suggesting that
Aristotle was the
world's first biologist. He accepted Aristotle as his "scientific hero", describing: "His genius was simply to invent biology." The research findings explained how music choice evolved in the pattern of
Charles Darwin's
natural selection. The study was published in the
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences in 2012. Leroi's research team also analysed the musical properties of the
US Billboard Hot 100 between 1960 and 2010, and found that
popular music emerged in three stylistic revolutions around 1964, 1983 and 1991. The study was published in the
Royal Society Open Science in 2015. Explaining the contributions of
The Beatles to the evolution of music, he said, "They're not making that [1964] revolution, they're joining it. In 2016, he presented
The Secret Science of Pop on BBC4. == Awards and honours ==