Professor Dobbs received her B.S. in Biology from the University of Georgia in 1977 and her Ph.D. in Molecular Biology from the University of Oregon in 1983. She received an NIH Postdoctoral Fellowship in 1984, and worked with Elizabeth Blackburn at the University of California, Berkeley. Dr. Dobbs joined Iowa State University in 1987. From 1999 through 2001, she served as the first Chair of the Bioinformatics and Computational Biology (BCB) Graduate Program at ISU. In 2015, Dr. Dobbs was named University Professor of Lowa State University.

Development of novel antiviral therapies against HIV-1 and other lentiviruses, Rational design of zinc finger proteins (ZFPs) as tools for genomic modification and gene therapy, Prediction of epitopes and nucleic acid binding residues in proteins, and prediction and experimental validation of structural and functional effects of mutations and SNPs in proteins.