Wagner did her undergraduate studies at RWTH Aachen University, graduating in 1983, and then continued at RWTH Aachen for her graduate studies, earning a Ph.D. in 1986 under the supervision of Rolf Möhring and Walter Oberschelp.[3][4]
She then earned her habilitation at Technische Universität Berlin in 1992. She stayed at TU Berlin as an assistant professor, also taking a temporary position at the University of Halle-Wittenberg in 1993, before becoming a full professor at the University of Konstanz in 1994. In 2003, she moved to Karlsruhe.[3]
Since 2007 she is vice president of the German Research Foundation (DFG).[5][6]
She is one of five editors-in-chief of the Journal of Discrete Algorithms, published by Elsevier,[7] and editor-in-chief of the OpenAccess Series in Informatics book series published by Schloss Dagstuhl.[8] She has been program committee chair or co-chair of the 10th Workshop on Algorithm Engineering and Experiments (ALENEX'2008), 14th International Symposium on Graph Drawing (GD'2006), 2nd Workshop on Algorithmic Methods and Models for Optimization of Railways (ATMOS'2002), 26th International Workshop on Graph-Theoretic Concepts in Computer Science (WG'2000), and 4th Workshop on Algorithm Engineering (WAE'2000), and been on the editorial boards and program committees of many more computer science journals and conferences.[5]
In 2019 Wagner was one of three candidates for the position as president of the DFG; after a year-long selection process, the position eventually went to Katja Becker.[9]
Schulz, Frank; Wagner, Dorothea; Weihe, Karsten (2000), "Dijkstra's algorithm on-line: an empirical case study from public railroad transport", J. Exp. Algorithmics, 5, doi:10.1145/351827.384254, S2CID6600150.
Wagner, Dorothea; Willhalm, Thomas (2003), "Geometric Speed-Up Techniques for Finding Shortest Paths in Large Sparse Graphs", in Di Battista, Giuseppe; Zwick, Uri (eds.), Algorithms - ESA 2003, Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol. 2832, Springer, pp. 776–787, doi:10.1007/978-3-540-39658-1_69, ISBN978-3-540-20064-2.
Brandes, Ulrik; Wagner, Dorothea (2004), "visone - Analysis and Visualization of Social Networks", in Jünger, Michael; Mutzel, Petra (eds.), Graph Drawing Software, Springer, pp. 321–340.