Chris Emerson Ph.D.

The Chemist Who Quit Stanford for a Tent in the Redwoods

Six months into his postdoctoral fellowship at Stanford, Chris Emerson walked away. Not to another lab, not to big pharma - to a medicinal cannabis farm in Mendocino, California, where he spent the next four months living in a tent, surrounded by thousands of plants. It was 2012. The legal cannabis industry barely existed. What he found there, at the intersection of plant biology and everything he knew about molecular pharmacology, became the founding thesis for LEVEL.

The observation was specific: most people who had tried cannabis - or who were hesitant to try it at all - described the same three experiences. Tiredness. Hunger. Paranoia. Emerson, whose PhD work at Oregon State had focused on the precise manipulation of molecules for targeted biological effects, recognized that these weren't inevitable facts of pharmacology. They were the predictable result of an industry handing consumers uncontrolled, inconsistent phytochemical inputs and calling the outcome medicine. The fix was tractable. It just required the kind of rigorous science the cannabis industry had not yet bothered with.

Before the tent, and before Stanford, Emerson had done something equally unusual. He served in the US Navy as a Chinese interpreter - meaning he trained to fluency in Mandarin, one of the most demanding languages for an English speaker to acquire, before pivoting to a BS in Professional Chemistry at the University of Nevada, Reno, and then a PhD at Oregon State. He is the kind of person who decides to do hard things and then does them methodically. The pivot to cannabis followed the same logic.

In 2015, Emerson and his co-founder and COO Brie Emerson launched LEVEL in San Francisco. The company - formally incorporated as Metta Medical - was built around a single insight: that effects-driven cannabinoid formulations, assembled from specific ratios of acidic cannabinoids, neutral cannabinoids, and nonenzymatic degradative byproducts, could deliver targeted, reproducible outcomes that the plant itself cannot provide. Not better THC. Different chemistry.

The rest of the cannabis industry was racing to 30% THC. Emerson was studying the other 65 cannabinoids - CBG, CBN, THCV, THCA, delta-8 THC, acidic forms the market ignored entirely - and figuring out what specific ratios of each compound could do to a specific consumer in a specific moment. LEVEL's Protab, Hashtab, Rosintab, and Tablingual product lines are organized not by strain or origin, but by intended effect: Energize, Create, Socialize, Relief, Calm, Sleep. The tablets are vegan, gluten-free, calorie-free, dosed precisely, and last three to six hours.

The results spoke plainly. By 2021, LEVEL was California's #1 cannabis capsule and pill brand by dollar sales, per both Headset Industry data and BDSA Retail Sales Tracking. BDS Analytics placed the company among California's top 25 cannabis companies overall. High Times named LEVEL one of its Top Cannabis Brands of 2020, praising the company for choosing to educate consumers rather than market to them.