[1][2] Following her Bachelors, she moved to India for a year to work with people with mental illness, while also conducting neuroscience research at the National Centre for Biological Sciences in Bangalore.

She did her doctoral work under the mentorship of Nobel Laureate Eric Kandel where she used California sea slugs (Aplysia californica) as a model organism to understand how small non-coding RNA molecules in nerve cells regulate the formation and storage of memories.

During her doctoral career, she discovered a brain-specific and highly conserved micro RNA (miR-124) that is abundant in the central nervous system (CNS) of sea slugs and that is important for establishing synaptic plasticity, or the ability of neuronal connections to strengthen and weaken over time.

[6] Furthermore, she found that piRNAs can epigenetically modify DNA to enable long-lasting changes in synaptic strength, which may provide insight into the maintenance of long-term memories.

[3] In 2017, Rajasethupathy was appointed the Jonathan M. Nelson Family Assistant Professor and head of the Laboratory of Neural Dynamics & Cognition at the Rockefeller University.