Stephen Levene is an American biophysicist and professor of

bioengineering Biological engineering or bioengineering is the application of principles of biology and the tools of engineering to create usable, tangible, economically-viable products. Biological engineering employs knowledge and expertise from a number o ...

, molecular biology, and physics at the University of Texas at Dallas.UT-Dallas Bioengineering Web Page
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Early life and education

Levene was born in New York City and attended Horace Mann School and

Andrew Hill High School Andrew Putnam Hill High School is a public secondary school, magnet, International Baccalaureate World School, and located in the Edenvale neighbourhood of San Jose, California, United States. The school opened in 1956, and educates approximately ...

in San Jose, California. He received his A.B. in Chemistry from Columbia University and his Ph.D. in Chemistry from Yale University. His doctoral work demonstrated and quantified the phenomenon of sequence-directed bending in DNA due to adenine-thymine tracts, and pioneered the use of

Monte Carlo simulation Monte Carlo methods, or Monte Carlo experiments, are a broad class of computational algorithms that rely on repeated random sampling to obtain numerical results. The underlying concept is to use randomness to solve problems that might be determini ...

to compute cyclization probabilities of DNA molecules having arbitrary preferred geometries. Upon leaving Yale, Levene became an

American Cancer Society The American Cancer Society (ACS) is a nationwide voluntary health organization dedicated to eliminating cancer. Established in 1913, the society is organized into six geographical regions of both medical and lay volunteers operating in more than ...

postdoctoral fellow at UC San Diego with Bruno Zimm, where he worked on the physical mechanism of gel electrophoresis.

Career

Research interests

Levene's research interests are broadly in the area of genome architecture and its maintenance by enzyme mechanisms and protein-DNA interactions. His work in this area began from the time he was a Staff Scientist at the Human Genome Center at

Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL), commonly referred to as the Berkeley Lab, is a United States Department of Energy National Labs, United States national laboratory that is owned by, and conducts scientific research on behalf of, t ...

, when he collaborated with Nicholas Cozzarelli's group on the structure and properties of supercoiled DNA and DNA catenanes. Levene's group has made both experimental and theoretical/computational contributions to understanding DNA topology and its relationship to local DNA structures, DNA-loop formation, site-specific DNA recombination, the structure of human telomeres, and extrachromosomal-circular DNA.

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Levene, Stephen D American biophysicists Columbia College (New York) alumni Living people University of Texas at Dallas faculty Yale University alumni Year of birth missing (living people)