Tilbury majored in electrical engineering at the University of Minnesota, choosing the subject because her father was an electrical engineer at Honeywell,^[4] and despite being told by her adviser that it was "not a good major for women".^[5] As a student, she began her work in control theory with a summer internship at Honeywell involving thermostats.^[4] She graduated summa cum laude, with a minor in French, in 1989,^[6] and completed her Ph.D. in electrical engineering and computer science at the University of California, Berkeley in 1994. Her dissertation, Exterior differential systems and nonholonomic motion planning, was supervised by Shankar Sastry,^[6][7] and concerned the problem of parallel parking for a vehicle towing multiple trailers.^[4] Throughout her education, none of her engineering professors were women.^[5]

She joined the University of Michigan as an assistant professor in 1995 and became full professor there in 2007. At Michigan, she has also directed the Ground Robotics Reliability Center from 2009 to 2011 and served as associate dean for research from 2014 to 2016.^[6]

She was appointed assistant director for engineering at the National Science Foundation in 2017, retaining her professor position at the University of Michigan.^[3] She is also vice president of the American Automatic Control Council.^[8]

Tilbury was named an IEEE Fellow in the class of 2009, affiliated with the IEEE Control Systems Society, "for leadership in networked and logic control systems".^[9] She was named a Fellow of the American Society of Mechanical Engineers (ASME) in 2012.^[6]

The American Automatic Control Council gave Tilbury their Donald P. Eckman Award, given annually to an outstanding young researcher in control theory, in 2001, "for research exemplifying engineering aspects of control systems and for significant contributions to logic control and networked/distributed control".^[10] The Society of Women Engineers named her as the inaugural winner of their Distinguished Engineering Educator award in 2012.^[11] In 2014 the ASME gave her their biennial Michael J. Rabins Leadership Award.^[12]

Tilbury is the coauthor of Control Tutorials for MATLAB and Simulink: A Web-based Approach (with W. C. Messner, Addison-Wesley, 1998) and Feedback Control of Computing Systems (with J. L. Hellerstein, Y. Diao, and S. Parekh, Wiley, 2004).^[4] Other highly-cited publications of Tilbury include:

• Walsh, G.; Tilbury, D.; Sastry, S.; Murray, R.; Laumond, J. P. (January 1994), "Stabilization of trajectories for systems with nonholonomic constraints", IEEE Transactions on Automatic Control, 39 (1): 216–222, doi:10.1109/9.273373
• Lian, Feng-Li; Moyne, J. R.; Tilbury, D. M. (February 2001), "Performance evaluation of control networks: Ethernet, ControlNet, and DeviceNet" (PDF), IEEE Control Systems Magazine, 21 (1): 66–83, doi:10.1109/37.898793
• Lian, Feng-Li; Moyne, J.; Tilbury, D. (March 2002), "Network design consideration for distributed control systems", IEEE Transactions on Control Systems Technology, 10 (2): 297–307, doi:10.1109/87.987076
• Yook, J. K.; Tilbury, D. M.; Soparkar, N. R. (July 2002), "Trading computation for bandwidth: reducing communication in distributed control systems using state estimators", IEEE Transactions on Control Systems Technology, 10 (4): 503–518, doi:10.1109/TCST.2002.1014671
• Otanez, P. G.; Moyne, J. R.; Tilbury, D. M. (2002), "Using deadbands to reduce communication in networked control systems", Proceedings of the 2002 American Control Conference (IEEE Cat. No.CH37301), Anchorage, AK, USA, 2002, vol. 4, pp. 3015–3020, doi:10.1109/ACC.2002.1025251, S2CID 17004252
• Moyne, J. R.; Tilbury, D. M. (January 2007), "The Emergence of Industrial Control Networks for Manufacturing Control, Diagnostics, and Safety Data", Proceedings of the IEEE, 95 (1): 29–47, doi:10.1109/JPROC.2006.887325, S2CID 6933117

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