 Sevanian earned his bachelor's degree in biology from California State University, Northridge and his master's degree and Ph.D. from the University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA).He went on to do postdoctoral work at UCLA under James Mead, and worked as an assistant research biochemist in the Laboratory of Nuclear Medicine and Radiation Biology.In 1981 Sevanian became one of the founding faculty members of Dr. Paul Hochstein's Institute for Toxicology at the University of Southern California (USC), which specialized in free radical and oxidative stress research.