Sonja Buckley was awarded her medical degree in 1944 from the University of Zurich, and she was later a microbiology instructor there.

[2] With her husband, she emigrated to the United States in 1947, as both of them had already arranged to work at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore.

[5] After working as a research assistant at Johns Hopkins for a short time, she joined the Sloan-Kettering Institute in New York City where she was chosen to head the solid tumor program in 1949.

In 1964, those labs were transferred to Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut, and became known as the Arbovirus Research Unit.

Specimens were sent to four different laboratories, including the Arbovirus Research Unit, where virologists attempted to isolate the causative agent, but Buckley was the first[1] to do so, working with her team, which included Wilbur Downs and Jordi Casals-Ariet,[1][3][4] Sonja Buckley retired from Yale in 1994, and died February 2, 2005, at the age of 86.