Dr Dorit Hockman received her undergraduate and MSc degrees from the University of Cape Town. Her MSc research investigated the molecular mechanisms of bat limb development. She did her PhD at the University of Cambridge as part of the Wellcome Trust 4 Year PhD Programme in Developmental Biology, where she explored the evolution and development of vertebrate hypoxia-sensitive cells. In 2013, Dorit joined Trinity College (University of Oxford) as a Junior Research Fellow and began work on her current research into the evolution of the neural crest gene regulatory network. From 2016, she worked as a Leverhulme Trust funded post-doctoral researcher in the Sauka-Spengler lab at the Weatherall Institute of Molecular Medicine. During this period, Dorit also held the Sydney Brenner Post-Doctoral Fellowship, which allowed her to establish a new collaboration between the University of Cape Town, the University of Oxford and the California Institute of Technology.

Dr Dorit Hockman was appointed as a lecturer in the Division of Cell Biology in 2018 and was awarded the Royal Society/African Academy of Sciences FLAIR fellowship in 2019.