Zabinsky did her undergraduate studies at the University of Puget Sound, majoring in mathematics with a minor in biology. Her interests from this time include optimization of transportation as well as predator-prey dynamics. After graduating, she worked at the National Marine Fisheries Service and Boeing before following her husband to Ann Arbor, Michigan, where she worked on applications of operations of research to health care at Vector Research, now part of the Altarum Institute.[2] She completed her Ph.D. in industrial and operations engineering at the University of Michigan. Her 1985 dissertation, Computational Complexity of Adaptive Algorithms in Monte Carlo Optimization, was supervised by Robert L. Smith.[3] She joined the University of Washington faculty in 1985.[1]
Book
Zabinsky is the author of the book Stochastic Adaptive Search in Global Optimization (Kluwer, 2004).[4]