Linnhoff-Popien finished her graduate studies in mathematics with focus informatics 1989 at Leipzig University.
Beginning in 1991 she worked as a research assistant at Aachen University of Technology,[1] where she earned her Ph.D. in 1994.
Linnhoff-Popien is member of more than 50 programme committees of international conferences organized by IFIP, ACM, IEEE, Gesellschaft für Informatik, VDE and further organizations.
She is expert witness for Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft, Federal Ministry of Education and Research (Germany) and German Academic Exchange Service.
She works on several research projects supported by industry and government including distributed computing and ubiquitous computing as well as service discovery and context awareness.