 As a high school student, Stevens was a student of the Ross Program, an experience which would later lead him to found the PROMYS  program along with fellow Ross alumni Marjory Baruch, David Fried, and Steve Rosenberg.Stevens earned his Ph.D. in Mathematics from Harvard University in 1981; his thesis advisor was Barry Mazur and the subject of his thesis was the special values of L-functions.Stevens’ research specialties are number theory, automorphic forms, and arithmetic geometry.