Dr. Stephen Levene

The legacy of Cecil H. and Ida Green at The University of Texas at Dallas was to establish in Dallas a world-class cohort of faculty and students in the new domain of integrated interdisciplinary biomedical research. This chair was endowed in 1995.


“My work has always inhabited the intersection of biology, chemistry, physics and engineering.”

Dr. Stephen Levene applies chemistry, mathematics and molecular and cell biology expertise to applications in biotechnology. His research focuses on protein-DNA interactions in site-specific recombination, gene regulation and other systems relevant to mechanisms of cellular programming.

Levene holds a PhD in chemistry from Yale University. His work there led to the discovery of sequence-dependent bending in DNA, work published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. He holds a bachelor’s degree in chemistry from Columbia University.

His career includes appointments at the Obermann Center for Advanced Studies at the University of Iowa; the Mathematical Sciences Research Institute at the University of California, Berkeley; the University of California San Diego; and the Human Genome Center at the Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory.

He joined UT Dallas in 1992 as an assistant professor of molecular and cell biology in the School of Natural Sciences and Mathematics, and was subsequently appointed an affiliate faculty member in the Department of Physics. In 2012, he became associate head of the Department of Bioengineering in the Erik Jonsson School of Engineering and Computer Science.

Levene has served as an editorial board member of the Journal of Experimental Biology and Medicine, and is an associate editor of BMC Biochemistry.