Gonen is an Investigator of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, a professor at the University of California, Los Angeles, the founding director of the MicroED Imaging Center at UCLA and a Member of the Royal Society of New Zealand.

He then obtained a Doctor of Philosophy in Biological Science in 2002 from the University of Auckland for research with by Edward N. Baker and Joerg Kistler.

Gonen's current research focuses on the structures and functions of medically important membrane proteins that are involved in homeostasis and method development in cryoEM, namely microcrystal electron diffraction (microED).

[2] The Gonen laboratory spearheaded the use of electron diffraction for the determination of protein structure from 3D nano crystals in a frozen hydrated state.

[9] MicroED has been used for drug discovery,[10] determination of membrane proteins such as ion channels[11] materials[12] and small organic molecules studied in a frozen hydrated state[13][14] and extended to sub atomic resolution better than 0.8Å.