 Bingham received his undergraduate degree at Blackburn College in Carlinville, Illinois, and then completed his PhD in Biochemistry and Molecular Biology at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts in 1980 (thesis advisor, Matthew Meselson) after completing an MS in Microbiology at the University of Illinois (with John W. Drake).He spent two years at the NIEHS before joining the faculty of the Department of Biochemistry and Cell Biology and the School of Medicine at Stony Brook University in 1982.He was part of a collaborative team that discovered of the parasitic DNA sequence element, the P element transposon This enabled a widely used strategy still used today for retrieving genes from animals.