[4] Dobbie has a master's degree from Massey University, completed in 1987 with a dissertation titled, Design of a monitor for the debugging and development of multiprocessing process control systems.

[6] She convenes the Mathematical and Information Sciences panel for the Marsden Fund of the New Zealand Royal Society.

[7] Dobbie's research centers on machine learning, including data stream mining and adversarial attacks.

The research group that she heads creates algorithms to be used in several application areas, such as "predicting peaks and troughs in COVID-19 cases, predicting dementia using routinely collected data, monitoring critical and/or remote sensors, and detecting and defending against various adversarial attacks.

"[1] She says she is "keen to work with people who have a tricky problem they would like to solve using machine learning.