Cheviron earned his Ph.D. from Louisiana State University in 2008. Prior to joining the faculty at the University of Montana in 2015, he held positions as a postdoctoral research fellow in the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at UCLA (2009-2010) and the School of Biological Sciences at the University of Nebraska, Lincoln (2010-2012), and as an assistant professor at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign (2012-2015).