Tammy studied at the University of Hong Kong, where she obtained her BA (First-Class Honours) and MPhil. Her MPhil thesis, entitled "Reading Aloud and Charles Dickens's Style", explores how Dickens's writing style was influenced by the Victorian practice of reading aloud, a prominent activity of the period which Dickens himself indulged in both privately and publicly. The thesis also discusses the interrelation between literature and linguistics (especially the concept of orality/aurality and Iconicity) in prose fiction. Tammy has presented papers in Auckland (New Zealand), Hong Kong (China), Krakow (Poland), Lancaster (UK), London (UK), Middelburg (the Netherlands) and Osaka (Japan) and has published academic articles on Victorian literature. She is an editor of the AHRC-funded journal, Victorian Network and is currently pursuing a PhD degree in English Literature (focusing on Neo-Victorian fiction) at King's College London.

Between September 2005 and August 2008, Tammy worked as a demonstrator at the School of English, the University of Hong Kong. Apart from teaching Literature and Linguistics, she also helped organise various literary and academic events for the School of English and the Faculty of Arts, including a three-day international conference Hong Kong Culture: Word and Image (6-8 December 2007) for the Faculty of Arts, HKU. The conference brought together renowned local and overseas scholars who are working on the visual and cultural representations of Hong Kong. At King's College London, Tammy continues to help organise events, including a cross-disciplinary discussion series entitled Creative King's (Spring 2009). She is also actively involved in the reading group, The Shows of London Nineteenth Century Group.

Tammy's short story "Let Her Go" won the second runner-up place in The Standard-RTHK Short Story Competition in 2005. Her poem "Elegy To A Brother Who Wrote Autobiographical Poems" (first published in Boxcar Poetry Review) was nominated for a Pushcart Prize (2008) and Frostwriting nominated her poem "The Famine" (first published in Quarterly Literary Review Singapore and reprinted in Frostwriting) for inclusion in Best of the Net Anthology (2009). In 2006, Tammy held a series of free-writing sessions with students from the Postgraduate Diploma in Creative Writing class from the School of English, HKU. She edited Hong Kong U Writing: An Anthology in 2006 and co-edited Love & Lust in 2008. From June 2007 to May 2008, she was a co-editor of Word Salad Poetry Magazine and she also served as an assistant poetry editor of Sotto Voce Magazine. In 2009, Tammy's poetry was exhibited in London (see here) and performed at the First Peng Chau Cultural Carnival 2009 (see here). She writes extensive comments on creative works published in Cha in the critique column, "A Cup of Fine Tea".