[1][2] Karlin went to Stanford for her undergraduate studies, receiving a bachelor's degree in 1981.

[3] She stayed at Stanford for graduate school, and earned Ph.D. in 1987 under the supervision of Jeffrey Ullman.

[4] She continued to work near Stanford, at the DEC Systems Research Center, for five years, before moving to the University of Washington in 1994.

[3] She was program chair of the IEEE Symposium on Foundations of Computer Science in 1997.

[5] She has written heavily cited papers on the use of randomized packet markings to perform IP traceback,[8] competitive analysis of multiprocessor cache coherence algorithms,[9] unified algorithms for simultaneously managing all levels of the memory hierarchy,[10] web proxy servers,[11] and hash tables with constant worst-case lookup time.