Onyinye grew up watching the older people in her family carry entire households on their backs, only to be quietly forgotten once they could no longer work. It was while caring for her own grandfather alongside her grandmother in his final years, navigating a healthcare system with almost nothing built for the elderly, and a community that treated his decline as an inconvenience that Onyinye saw the gap she would spend her life trying to close.

That experience set her on a path from practice into research. Trained in public health and social work, she spent years working alongside community health workers across southern Nigeria, documenting cases of elder neglect and abuse that rarely made it into any official record. Today, she is a doctoral researcher in the Department of Human Development and Family Science and the Center for Gerontology at Virginia Tech, where her work examines elder mistreatment, rural aging, and the experiences of homebound older adults studying how geographic isolation, limited access to services, and family and community dynamics shape whether mistreatment is recognized and addressed at all. Her research also explores surrogate decision-making and guardianship, and the delicate balance between protecting older adults, preserving their autonomy, and preventing exploitation.

Her research has been shaped by collaboration with the National Center on Elder Abuse, practice-based work with the New River Valley Agency on Aging, and mentorship through the National Collaboratory to Address Elder Mistreatment work recognized when she was named Graduate Student of the Year by the Virginia Tech Graduate School. In founding the Onyinye Mbanefo Foundation, she brought research and lived experience together into one mission: a Nigeria where growing old is met with respect, not silence and where every caregiver has the tools to meet it with care instead of guilt.