Tapia is originally from
Albuquerque; as a strong mathematics student at
Sandia High School she became a participant in the New Mexico High School Supercomputing Challenge, and interned at
Sandia National Laboratories. She went to
Tulane University, initially intending to major in biomedical engineering but soon adding a second major in computer science and, by her junior year, switching entirely to computer science. At Tulane, she lists Johnette Hassell as a faculty mentor for her bachelor's thesis on
women in computing. She graduated in 1998. After graduation, she began working at Sandia National Laboratories, before returning to graduate study at
Texas A&M University. During her graduate studies, at age 24, she experienced two
strokes caused by a blood-clotting disorder, was hospitalized for three months, and had to undergo extensive therapy to retrain her motor skills; fortunately, her higher cognition was unaffected. She completed a Ph.D. in 2009, a year delayed, with the dissertation
Intelligent Motion Planning and Analysis with Roadmap Methods for the Study of Complex and High-Dimensional Motion supervised by
Nancy Amato. After postdoctoral research on
protein folding with Ron Elber at the
University of Texas at Austin, she joined the University of New Mexico as an assistant professor in 2011. She was tenured as an associate professor in 2017 and promoted to full professor in 2022. Since 2022, she has chaired the university's Department of Computer Science. ==Recognition==