She is retired as a professor of computer science and engineering at IIT Madras.
After studies at Madras Christian College in Chennai,[2] she completed a Ph.D. at the University of Madras in 1974, with the dissertation Studies in Parallelism and Picture Languages supervised by Rani Siromoney.
[3] She joined the Department of Computer Science & Engineering at IIT Madras in 1975, and retired as a full professor in 2014.
[3] Krithivasan is the coauthor of the textbook Introduction to Formal Languages, Automata Theory and Computation (with Rama R, Dorling Kinderley, 2009).
Krithivasan is a member of the Indian National Academy of Engineering.