The Modern Health CEO and Booth alumnus has ties across Chicago.
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- March 11, 2026
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Matt Levin’s 10 Favorite Things
Matt Levin, MBA ’98, is CEO of Modern Health, a global workplace platform focused on making mental health a strength for organizations and individuals worldwide by delivering accessible, personalized, and globally equitable care. Levin’s more than 20 years of leadership experience across healthcare and HR technology includes CEO roles at People2.0 and Benefitfocus, as well as senior strategy and corporate development positions at ADP, Aon, and Hewitt Associates. He was named to Crain’s Chicago Business’s 40 Under 40 list in 2011 and was honored as a Young Global Leader by the World Economic Forum in 2013.
Levin was raised in suburban Northbrook with ties across the city of Chicago—his father was born in the Merrionette Manor neighborhood on the South Side, his mother grew up in nearby Chatham, and his grandfather owned a hardware store on the West Side. He received an undergraduate degree from Northwestern University and then enrolled at Booth. He and his wife, Deneese Walia Levin, JD ’03, live in the Lincoln Park neighborhood and have three children: Simon, Malini, and Rania. Levin’s love for Chicago is a thread that runs through his list of favorite things. “I was born here, and I’ve lived here most of my life,” Levin says of the city. “I’m a proud, loyal Chicagoan. No place I’d rather live.” Levin told Chicago Booth Magazine about 10 of his favorite things.
His ‘Book Club’ Golf Group
My friend Pat taught me how to play golf about 12 years ago. He’s a patient soul. To this day, I play only with a handful of friends, and we generally go to the Beverly Country Club on the South Side. It’s our way to relax. We call it “Book Club.” The Bev often attracts Nobel Prize laureates, such as Eugene F. Fama, MBA ’64, PhD ’64; Richard H. Thaler; and Barack Obama. Shortly after Professor Thaler won his Nobel, he was golfing at the Bev and our Book Club was the foursome behind him on the course. He spent the round talking to a reporter. It was cool to see.
A Scene From The Untouchables
There’s a famous scene in The Untouchables (1987), a movie about the real-life Prohibition agents in Chicago who finally took down Al Capone. Eliot Ness is the leader of the group. Jim Malone is an Irish-American cop who’s part of Ness’s team. The scene takes place on the US–Canada border, where Ness and Malone, assisted by the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, capture one of Capone’s enforcers in the course of breaking up a bootlegging operation. Malone uses a vigilante tactic to scare the enforcer into turning informant. It works, but the RCMP officer isn’t amused, telling Ness, “I do not approve of your methods.” Ness turns to him and says, “Yeah, well, you’re not from Chicago!” Many people have probably heard of The Untouchables, but they might not know that Ness earned his undergraduate degree in business administration in 1925 from the University of Chicago—he’s a fellow grad!
Open-Sea Sailboat Racing
I love sailing, and for many years, I was on a team that did open-sea racing. The team owner is my friend Bryon, and I’m really grateful he asked me to be part of his crew. I’ve done some crazy—you might even say modestly dangerous—races across the world with Bryon. In 2013, we actually won the Hong Kong to Vietnam Race, 673 nautical miles from Victoria Harbor to Nha Trang across the South China Sea. It took us just over 50 hours to finish the race, but it took a lot more than 50 hours for me to recover.
A Hydraulic Wood Splitter
We have a farm in southwest Michigan where we spend as many weekends as we can. Our favorite tool is a hydraulic wood splitter that my son, Simon, bought a few years ago. Simon likes to take out the tractor and haul dead trees from the ravines. He hands them over to me to split into firewood. I’ve spent days and days splitting wood—there’s a Zen feeling to it. We give away most of it to local families, who use it to heat their homes in the winter. Simon is now working toward a degree in sustainability/energy, environmental economics, and business.
Donning His Wife’s Stole
Deneese and I got married when she was in law school at the University of Chicago. Since I’d started at Booth straight from undergrad, I had already earned my degree by the time she was finishing hers. I was enormously proud, as a fellow UChicago graduate and her spouse, to participate in her donning of the stoles. It’s one of my most cherished memories. I still tear up every time I look at this photo.
The Chicago Bears and Soldier Field
The Chicago Bears are the most important franchise in the history of world civilization. The ’85 Chicago Bears were the most important team to me as a boy, and the Bears’ stadium, Soldier Field—the original, before its early 2000s reconstruction—remains iconic to me. Go Bears!
A Family Trip to Amritsar, India
Deneese and I are both the oldest of four children. We grew up in middle-class households, and when you have that many siblings, you learn early how to stretch dollars. Travel to me as a kid was riding in our red, wood-paneled station wagon to Florida to stay at a Radisson. Deneese and I made a commitment that if we could ever afford it, we’d take our kids to see the world. We wanted travel to be a chance for them to have equal exposure to our respective cultures. Deneese is Sikh, so one of our trips was to the Golden Temple in Amritsar, India—the holiest site in Sikhism.
Dim Sum in Chinatown
When Simon was young, he and I went to Chinatown every Sunday morning for dim sum. His favorite places were MingHin and Phoenix. We could eat dumplings all day.
The Police (and Taylor Swift)
The Police is my favorite band of all time. The first song at my wedding was “Every Little Thing She Does Is Magic” (an acoustic version). They broke up in 1984, when I was 11, but I did get to see them in 2007 for their Reunion Tour. It was the highest-grossing tour that year and among the top 10 of that decade. Of course, Taylor Swift’s recent Eras Tour holds the record for the highest-grossing tour of all time. My daughters have turned me into a Swiftie. I got to see the tour twice when we took the girls.
Succession
As a kid, I loved watching Miami Vice, and in high school, it was LA Law. But my all-time favorite TV show is Succession, a drama about the tyrannical media magnate Logan Roy and his children’s fight over control of the empire he built. The best character for me is Stewy Hosseini, the obnoxious friend of one of the Roy children, Kendall. The actor who played Stewy scathingly described him as “the son that Logan always wanted.”
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