She graduated from the University of Waterloo with a B.A.Sc. in 1992, and from Imperial College London, with a M.Sc. in 1993, from the University of California, Berkeley, with a PhD in 1998.She currently holds a joint appointment as an associate professor in the Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics and the Department of Electrical Engineering, at Stanford Universitywhere she is director of the Hybrid Systems Laboratory and as an associate professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at University of California, Berkeley. She is married to UC Berkeley Dean of College of Engineering S. Shankar Sastry, her former professor.
Prof. Tomlin's research focuses on applications, unmanned aerial vehicles, air traffic control and modeling of biological processes. She was named a MacArthur Fellow in September 2006.
In 2003, she was named to the MIT Technology Review TR100 as one of the top 100 innovators in the world under the age of 35.