 Bronk earned her doctorate in marine-estuarine and environmental sciences from the University of Maryland in 1992, and completed postdoctoral research at the University of California, Santa Cruz in 1993.She held a professorship at the University of Georgia between 1994 and 2000, and at the College of William & Mary's Virginia Institute of Marine Science between 2000 and 2018.She chaired that university's department of physical sciences for two years until becoming the president and CEO of Bigelow Laboratory for Ocean Sciences in 2018.