Stephen Levene is an American biophysicist and professor of bioengineering, molecular biology, and physics at the University of Texas at Dallas.
His doctoral work demonstrated and quantified the phenomenon of sequence-directed bending in DNA due to adenine-thymine tracts,[2][3] and pioneered the use of Monte Carlo simulation to compute cyclization probabilities of DNA molecules having arbitrary preferred geometries.
[4][5][6] Upon leaving Yale, Levene became an American Cancer Society postdoctoral fellow at UC San Diego with Bruno Zimm, where he worked on the physical mechanism of gel electrophoresis.
[7][8][9] 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, when he collaborated with Nicholas Cozzarelli's group on the structure and properties of supercoiled DNA[10] and DNA catenanes.