She carried out her doctoral studies at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Physical Chemistry and Electrochemistry at Berlin-Dahlem, writing her thesis on the spectra of alkali metal halides under the supervision of Peter Pringsheim [de] and Fritz Haber.
By the time she completed it in 1934, the Nazi Party had been elected to office in Germany, and Jews were no longer allowed to be hired for academic positions.
Working with James Franck and George de Hevesy, she published a number of papers on the use of radioactive substances in biology.
When the Nazis began rounding up Danish Jews in September 1943, Levi fled to Sweden, where she worked for the biologist John Runnström at the Wenner-Gren Institute for Experimental Biology in Stockholm.
She spent the 1947–48 academic year in the United States learning about the recently discovered techniques of radiocarbon dating and autoradiography, which she introduced to Europe.
She retired from the Zoophysiological Laboratory in 1979, but became involved with the Niels Bohr Archive, where she collected papers of de Hevesy, eventually publishing his biography.
For her doctorate, she was accepted into the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Physical Chemistry and Electrochemistry at Berlin-Dahlem, where she wrote her thesis on the spectra of alkali metal halides,[4] under the supervision of Peter Pringsheim and Fritz Haber.
[7] Levi never married,[1] but became friends with many of the Jewish physicists who did visit the institute, including Otto Frisch, George Placzek, Rudolf Peierls, Leon Rosenfeld, Edward Teller and Victor Weisskopf.
[5] Levi worked as Franck's assistant, publishing two papers with him on the fluorescence of chlorophyll, until he left Denmark for the United States in 1935.
[1] When the war ended, de Hevesy elected to stay in Sweden, and Bohr decided to drop biological research at the institute and return to concentrating on physics.
Levi accepted a position at the Zoophysiological Laboratory in Copenhagen, under August Krogh, who, like Bohr, had won a Nobel Prize.