[1] As of July 1, 2019, he is SVP and head of neuroscience and rare diseases research and early development at Roche in Basel, Switzerland.

He enrolled at Queen's University in Kingston, Ontario, where he earned his medical degree in 1986.

Bonni did his Ph.D. and postdoctoral studies in the laboratory of Michael Greenberg between 1992 and 1999,[4] where he discovered signaling mechanisms by which neurotrophic factors, including ciliary neurotrophic factor (CNTF) and neurotrophins, induce transcription and cell differentiation and survival in the nervous system.

[1] Bonni moved to the Department of Neurobiology at Harvard Medical School in 2011.

His laboratory has made seminal contributions to the study of cell-intrinsic transcriptional and ubiquitin pathways that regulate neuronal connectivity in the developing brain.