Born in the Russian SFSR in the Soviet Union in 1971, Zalevsky moved to Israel with his family in 1979. He obtained a BSc in Electrical engineering from Tel Aviv University in 1993. He went on to obtain a PhD in Optoelectronics from the same university in 1996, his Doctoral thesis was in the field of Super-resolution. He accepted a position at Bar Ilan University in 2003. He is the head of the Opto-electronics division in the Electrical engineering faculty since then. In 2007, Zalevsky was one of the leading founders of the Bar-Ilan Institute of Nanotechnology & Advanced Materials (BINA).