Aaron Ponti is a biologist by training. He received his PhD at the Department of Mechanical and Process Engineering at the ETH Zurich in 2003, for his pioneering work on the development of a software platform for the analysis of Fluorescence Speckle Microscopy applied to the study of cell motility.

He then moved to The Scripps Research Institute, San Diego, California, for his post-doc, where he further developed the software.

He joined the Friedrich Miescher Institute (part of Novartis Research Foundation) in Susan Gasser's group in April 2005 and moved to FMI's Facility for Advanced Imaging and Microscopy in January 2006.