He received his PhD in Computer Science from the University of North Carolina in 1989. In the 1970's Levoy worked on computer animation, developing an early computer-assisted cartoon animation system. In the 1980's Levoy worked on volume rendering, a family of techniques for displaying sampled three-dimensional functions, such as CT and MR data. In the 1990's he worked on technology and algorithms for 3D scanning. This led to the Digital Michelangelo Project, in which he and a team of researchers spent a year in Italy digitizing the statues of Michelangelo using laser rangefinders. His current interests include light field sensing and display, computational imaging, and digital photography. Levoy received the NSF Presidential Young Investigator Award in 1991 and the SIGGRAPH Computer Graphics Achievement Award in 1996 for his work in volume rendering.