In 1982, he was one of the co-founders of the Institute for Minnesota Archaeology and worked with that organization until 1995 to develop long-term programs of research, education, and stewardship.  His primary research involved the emergence of food production, cultural transformation, and environmental change at the Red Wing Locality in southeastern Minnesota.  His research in the application of high-precision radiocarbon dating at the Locality was funded by the National Science Foundation.  Dobbs developed a series of public education programs to complement the research program in the Red Wing region and was instrumental in the purchase and preservation of two major sites in this area.

In 1987, he incorporated the use of geophysical survey into the Red Wing program and the application of geophysical methods to archaeological research has become one of his major research interests.  He now collaborates with geophysicist Donald W. Johnson and they have conducted geophysical projects in North America, Italy, and Turkey.

Dobbs also has extensive experience as an environmental consultant specializing in cultural resource management, where he has applied his research skills and interests to consulting problems.  Since 1984, he has worked for the St. Paul District, U.S. Army Corps of Engineers on a number of projects along the Upper Mississippi River.  Two of the largest of these projects involved the inter-disciplinary mapping and study of river evolution, geomorphology, culture history, and archaeology.  The first of these studies occurred in 1988 and focused solely on Pool 4 in Minnesota and Wisconsin.  In 1997 - 1999, he was Principal Investigator for a subsequent geomorphological and archaeological study that encompassed more than 175 miles of the Mississippi in Pools 1 - 10 in Minnesota, Iowa, and Wisconsin.  His primary area of practice, however, has been cultural resource management within the pipeline industry.  Since 1990, he has been the Principal Investigator for 14 major pipeline projects that covered more than 3,000 miles in seven states and was responsible for the entire United States portion of the massive Alliance Pipeline Project (1997 - 2000).

Dobbs has been an author or principal investigator for more than 500 technical reports and documents.  He has excellent writing skills and has extensive experience in conceptualizing, managing, and preparing complex inter-disciplinary documents.  He is accustomed to working with teams of multiple authors and analysts, as well as assembling and analyzing multiple sets of information and data.  Most recently, he has completed two major inter-disciplinary data recovery reports for the Alliance Pipeline Project; a data recovery plan for a series of Woodland sites in Minnesota; a major article on geophysical investigations at Çatalhöyük (Turkey); and participated as the cultural resource specialist with the Environmental Compliance Monitoring Group (ECMG) for the IFC and World Bank on the Chad-Cameroon Pipeline Project.  He served as Ph.D. advisor to Dr. Ronald C. Schirmer who recently completed his dissertation on the plant materials from Red Wing and also serves on the Editorial Board for the Midcontinent Journal of Archaeology.