A mathematician and physicist, Bodnia earned a Ph.D. in quantum information and algebraic topology from the University of California, Santa Barbara.

At UCSB, her thesis was under her chair advisor Dirk Bouwmeester, Jon McCammond, Ben Bazin and Michel Devoret, who shared the 2025 Nobel Prize in Physics for “the discovery of macroscopic quantum mechanical tunnelling and energy quantisation in an electric circuit.”

She also worked on neuroscience and brain development at UCSB with collaboration of Google Quantum AI, which helped inspire her pursuit of AI reasoning that does not rely on the text-based models used in many LLMs.

She also built expertise in topology, the study of geometric properties and spatial relations, which has proved essential in understanding how to handle large information sets of almost infinite size.

Bodnia earned her undergraduate degree in physics from the University of California, Berkeley, where she studied with the physicists Robert Cahn and Daniel McKinsey. She considers Cahn, a global leader in elementary particle theory, to be her “true mentor.”

Bodnia is the author or co-author of 22 academic papers on dark matter, quantum mechanics, and particle physics.