Nancy M. Bonini
University of Pennsylvania
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Primary Section: 26, Genetics Secondary Section: 27, Evolutionary Biology Membership Type:
Member
(elected 2012)
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Biosketch
Nancy M Bonini is the Florence RC Murray Professor in the Department of Biology at the University of Pennsylvania. She holds adjunct or secondary appointments in Neurosciences and Cell and Developmental Biology Departments in the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania. She is known for her studies that introduced Drosophila as a model for human neurodegenerative disease, which is now a vital and vigorous area of model organism research. Dr. Bonini grew up in Princeton, New Jersey. She graduated from Princeton University with a degree in Biology, attended the University of Wisconsin-Madison for graduate school in the Neurosciences, then Caltech as a postdoctoral scientist. She started her laboratory at the University of Pennsylvania in 1994. She has served on the Board of the Genetics Society of America, Editor of the Annual Reviews of Genetics, and is a member of both the National Academy of Sciences and the National Academy of Medicine.
Research Interests
The research in the Bonini laboratory is focused on understanding mechanisms of genes and risk factors that impact longterm health of the brain. Such genes include those for neurodegenerative disease that contribute to motor neuron disease and dementia. Risk factors include environmental toxins, traumatic brain injury and aging itself. Her work typically involves generating a “model” in the fly Drosophila, then applying the many genetic approaches of the organism to learn and understand the mechanisms, while also modulating the impact. The laboratory typically extends finding to mammalian systems, to highlight conservation of discoveries.
