In 1974 Lombardi began his undergraduate studies at Dowling College and graduated cum laude in the biology major and physics minor in 1977.

Upon graduation, Lombardi accepted a postdoctoral appointment and lectureship in the biological sciences at the University of North Carolina which he held until 1986.

In 1989 he developed and marketed The Bone Box,[2] a commercial 3D auto-tutorial program for use in learning human skeletal anatomy with the early Macintosh computer.

Lombardi eventually founded ViOS, Inc. where, during the period from 1999 to 2001, he served as the venture capital-backed company's first CEO and then chief creative officer/software architect.

There, he and his team designed and implemented ViOS, a client–server technology that enabled the first 3D user interface to network deliverable resources (including the Internet) in the form of a highly customizable and massively multi-user online virtual environment – essentially a very large scale social software system/3D wiki.