[1] Trenk graduated from Harvard University in 1985 and became a high school mathematics teacher.
She began graduate study at Johns Hopkins University in 1987, earned a master of science in education in 1989, and completed a Ph.D. in 1991.
[4] Her dissertation, Generalized Perfect Graphs, was supervised by Ed Scheinerman.
[4][5] After postdoctoral research at Dartmouth College and the University of Massachusetts Amherst, she joined the Wellesley faculty in 1992.
At Wellesley, she won the Pinanski Teaching Prize in 1995,[6] became a full professor in 2005, and served as department chair from 2014 to 2016.