He is the founding director of the Indian Institute of Science Education and Research (IISER), Mohali, Punjab, India and the President of Chemical Research Society of India.

Sathyamurthy moved to the United States where he obtained his Ph.D degree working with L.M.

He further carried out postdoctoral research in Nobel laureate J.C. Polanyi's laboratory.

After that Sathyamurthy joined the Indian Institute of Technology Kanpur as a lecturer in 1978.

He and his group have made notable contributions on the sensitivity of molecular reaction dynamics, accuracy of the potential energy surface, effect of reagent rotation, vibration and orientation on reaction cross section, chaos and fractals in chemical dynamics, reactive scattering resonances in atom-molecule collisions, transition state spectrum, isotope effect on Raman excitation profiles, channel control in chemical reactions, vibration mediated photodissociation, structure and stability of water clusters, water molecules in a confined environment, blue shift in stretching frequency of molecules in a confined environment, host–guest interaction in endohedral fullerenes, stacking and spreading interaction in N-heteroaromatic systems, intra- and inter- molecular hydrogen bond, and atomic and molecular clusters as designer materials for the nanoworld.