Tomlin was a student of mathematics and of the history of science and philosophy of science at the University of Leeds, where she earned a combined bachelors degree in those topics in 1987. She continued at Leeds as a graduate student in physical chemistry, completing her dissertation Bifurcation analysis for non-linear chemical kinetics' in 1990.
After earning her doctorate, and performing post-doctoral research at Leeds and Princeton University, she returned to Leeds as a lecturer in the Department of Fuel and Energy in 1994.