[2] She started her research career in parallel algorithms; at the NCBI, her research takes a computational approach to problems in systems biology involving cancer, gene regulation, and the analysis of massive data.
[3] Przytycka is originally from Myszków; her parents, native of the village Gorajec in eastern Poland, were well-educated in part through the Polish underground education.
She studied mathematics and computer science at the University of Warsaw,[3] earning a master's degree there in 1982.
In the mid-1990s, her husband was tenured at George Washington University on the US east coast, and she determined to find positions nearby, at the same time shifting her research interests to computational biology.
[5] In 2021 Przytycka was named a Fellow of the International Society for Computational Biology, "for her fundamental algorithmic contributions to a wide range of problems in computational systems biology, especially in network analysis, network-based approaches to uncover disease genes, network reconstruction, regulatory roles of DNA conformation dynamics and RNA aptamer analysis".