[Plugin: Paid Memberships Pro] Getting user's membership level

I’m trying to add the user’s membership level to the posts table for quick reference for editors. Basically the workflow of the site is that all users can post drafts, but editors only publish posts for users that have a particular membership level. Rather than having editors click back and forth between the membership list (which I’d rather not reveal to editors to begin with) and the posts list, I’d like to have the user’s membership level as one of the fields in that list. I have added the column, but am struggling at hooking into the post’s user’s membership level. I’m looking through your sql query you use on your membership list and, I suppose I could do a similar query, but rather than have that query run for each post in the loop (very server intensive), I’d rather be able to grab the membership level from get_the_author_meta(). Is that possible? Any help is greatly appreciated! 🙂

http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/paid-memberships-pro/