He attended Fourah Bay College in Sierra Leone, then obtained his doctoral degree from the University of Connecticut in 1996.
His Ph.D. dissertation on “Gravitational Perturbations of Radiating Spacetimes”[1] along with his founding of and activities in the “Rwanda Education Reconstruction Effort” (RERE) earned him the 1996 Ph.D. "Graduate of the Year" at the University of Connecticut.
[2] Mbonye held a postdoctoral position at the University of Michigan and was a professor at the Rochester Institute of Technology until 2011.
Mbonye has made important contributions to theoretical physics, including the Mbonye-Kazanas model of non-singular black holes,[3] cosmology with interacting dark energy,[4] and models for the origin of the M–sigma relation.
[5] Mbonye is currently Vice-Rector in Charge of Academic Affairs at the National University of Rwanda, and RIT-NUR Research Professor at the Rochester Institute of Technology.