[1] Rakhilina received her diploma in structural and applied linguistics from Moscow State University in 1980, and her Candidate of Sciences degree from the Institute of Linguistics of the Russian Academy of Sciences in 1988; her thesis topic was Interrogative elements in a human-machine dialogue.
In 2000 she received a Doctor of Sciences degree from the same institution on the topic of Cognitive analysis of concrete nouns: semantics and combinability.
In 2011 she simultaneously took up a position as head of department and full professor at the Higher School of Economics.
[3] Ekaterina Rakhilina has made contributions to the fields of semantics, linguistic typology, lexicology and lexicography, corpus linguistics, the theory of construction grammar, and the study of Russian grammar, among others.
[1][4] In the area of lexical typology she has led projects on pain predicates, rotation verbs, words for qualities and physical properties, animal sounds, temperature adjectives, and verbs of movement in water.