Trumbore earned her bachelor of science in geology at the University of Delaware in 1981 and doctoral degree in geochemistry from Columbia University in 1989. She held post-doctoral fellowships with the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology and Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, and joined the faculty at the University of California, Irvine (UCI) in 1991.[1][2] She is currently a Professor of Earth System Science at UCI, co-director the W.M. Keck Carbon Cycle Accelerator Mass Spectrometry Facility, and director of the UCI branch of the Institute for Geophysics and Planetary Physics. She has also been a director at the Max Planck Institute for Biogeochemistry since 2009.[1][3]