Levi received his B.A. in chemistry from Augustana College (SD) in 2001. In 2002, he began his graduate studies with Professor Mukund P. Sibi at North Dakota State University, where he developed enantioselective dipolar cycloadditions and studied applications of chiral relay ligands and auxiliaries in enantioselective catalysis. After receiving his Ph.D. in 2007, he moved to the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign as a National Institutes of Health Postdoctoral Fellow working with Professor John F. Hartwig. At the University of Illinois, he studied iridium-catalyzed allylic substitution reactions and the application of C-H functionalization and a-arylation reactions to natural product synthesis. In 2011, he received a Pathways to Independence Award (K99) from the NIH to develop a new platform for the generation of artificial metalloenzyme catalysts under the mentorship of Professors John F. Hartwig and Huimin Zhao. Levi joined the faculty in January 2012 as an Assistant Professor.