Dr. Bonini is Professor of Biology at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia, PA. After receiving her PhD at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, she performed postdoctoral work at Caltech learning the Drosophila system, in studies with Dr. Seymour Benzer. She started her own research laboratory at Penn in 1994, where she launched the studies that use Drosophila as a model for human disease. In this work, she expressed various human disease genes in the fly to show that these genes mimicked human neurodegenerative disease features, then launched discovery genetic pathways that influence the effects. She is currently the Florence RC Murray Professor of Biology, and has been elected to the National Academy of Sciences, the National Academy of Medicine and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.