She is a professor at the Department of Informatics of the University of Bergen in Norway,[1] where she directs the Selmer Center in Secure Communication[2] and leads Boolean functions team.

[4] Her PhD dissertation is The equivalence of almost bent and almost perfect nonlinear functions and their generalizations.

[4] Budaghyan is the author of the book Construction and Analysis of Cryptographic Functions (Springer, 2014).

[6] Budaghyan won the Emil Artin Junior Prize in Mathematics for outstanding contributions in algebra, geometry and number theory in 2011 for a joint paper with Tor Helleseth titled “New commutative semifields defined by new PN multinomials”.

[7][8] In 2022 another paper co-authored by Budaghyan led to Emil Artin Junior Prize "Relation between o-equivalence and EA-equivalence for Niho bent functions".