Zenobi-Wong completed her undergraduate degree in mechanical engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and a graduate degree at Stanford University. She completed her PhD on the role of mechanical forces in skeletal development in 1990. After this, she first worked for a year as a postdoc in the Orthopaedic Research Laboratories, University of Michigan, before moving to the University of Bern as group leader Cartilage Biomechanics in 1992, where she habilitated in 2000. In 2003, she moved to ETH Zürich, first to the Institute for Biomedical Engineering, and later to the Department of Health Sciences and Technology, where she became an associate professor in 2017.