Dr. Benjamin received her undergraduate degree at Harvard, her MD at Case Western Reserve University, and her Master's in Epidemiology at Harvard School of Public Health. She is a Professor of Medicine at Boston University and is a clinical cardiologist at Boston Medical Center. At the Framingham Heart Study, she serves as Director of the Echocardiography and Vascular Function Laboratories and a Member of the Executive Committee. She is Principal Investigator of the grant that recruited the second generation of the Framingham Study's ethnic/racial minority cohort, the Omni Study.

Dr. Benjamin has conducted research at the Framingham Study since 1988 on the genetics, epidemiology, and prognosis of atrial fibrillation, cardiac risk factors for stroke, echocardiography, valvular pathology, vascular function and the relation of systemic inflammation to cardiovascular disease. She is Principal Investigator on two NHLBI RO1 grants investigating the association of inflammation [R01 HL76784] and of vascular function [1RO1 HL70100; arterial tonometry to assess vascular stiffness and brachial reactivity to assess endothelial function] to subclinical and clinical cardiovascular disease. She is also Principal Investigator of the Framingham Component of the CardioGenomics Program in Genomics Applications, which is investigating the genetics of cardiac structure and function in collaboration with the Broad Institute and Harvard Medical School. She is an Associate Editor for Circulation, a leading cardiology journal.

Dr. Benjamin is a Fellow of the American College of Cardiology and of the American Heart Association. She has volunteered for the American Heart Association since 1992; serving on a variety of local and national Committees. Currently she serves as a member of the national American Heart Association's Interdisciplinary Working Group Steering Committee Functional Genomics & Translational Biology. She also is a member of the American College of Cardiology's Prevention Committee.