Bolnick was raised in Durham, North Carolina; Washington, DC; Jakarta, Indonesia; and Reading, Massachusetts, where he became interested in natural history.

He obtained his PhD at the University of California at Davis, initially studying with Art Woods, then Les Gottlieb, before ending up working with Peter Wainwright.

[4] Near the end of his PhD studies in 2003, Bolnick accepted his first faculty position at the University of Texas at Austin's (UT) Department of Integrative Biology, where he began in Fall 2004.

During his tenure at UT, he studied threespine stickleback fish in lakes and streams around Vancouver Island, British Columbia to see how species evolve.

[7] In recognition of his research, he was a David and Lucile Packard Foundation 2007 Fellow[8] and received a 6-year fellowship as a Howard Hughes Medical Institute's Early Career Scientist from 2009 to 2015.