In 1987, Jeff Trinkle received a PhD from the Department of Systems Engineering at the University of Pennsylvania, where he was a research assistant in the GRASP Laboratory. In his early years as an academic, he held faculty positions in the Department of Systems and Industrial Engineering at the University of Arizona and the Department of Computer Science at Texas A&M University. From 1998 to 2003, he was a visiting research scientist at the Intelligent Systems and Robotics Center at Sandia National Laboratories in Albuquerque, New Mexico. He moved to Rensselear Polytechnic Institute in Troy, New York, in 2003, where he served as Chair of the Computer Science Department until 2009 and then Dean of Residential Commons until 2014. In 2014, he took leave from Rennselaer to lead the National Robotics Initive (NRI) Program at the National Science Foundation. He moved from Rensselaer to Lehigh University in 2019 as the P.C. Rossin Chair of Computer Science and Engineering. He is now Professor Emertius, actively working in the Autonomous Intelligent Robotics (AIR) Lab.

Trinkle's primary research interests lie in the areas of robot grasping and dexterous manipulation and the related area of multibody dynamics. Under the continuous support of the National Science Foundation since 1989, he has written many technical articles on theoretical issues underpinning the science of robotics and automation. One of these articles was the first to develop a now-popular method for simulating multibody systems. Variants of this method are key components of several physics engines for computer game development, for example, NVIDIA PhysX and the Bullet Physics Library.

Trinkle is the recipient of the 1985 IBM Graduate Research Fellowship, the 1989 Research Initiation Award from the National Science Foundation, the 1994 Texas A&M Center for Teaching Excellence Award, the 1998 Plank Company Faculty Fellowship, the 2004 Kayamori Best Automation Paper of the IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation, and the 2010 Humboldt Research Prize. He spent the 2009-2010 academic year as a Humboldt Fellow at the Institute for Mechatronics and Robotics at the German Aerospace Center and the Institute for Applied Mechanics at Technical University of Munich. In 2010 he became a fellow of the IEEE for his research contributions to robotic grasping and dexterous manipulation. For two and a half years starting in 2014, Dr. Trinkle served as the lead program officer for the National Robotics Initiative at the National Science Foundation.