[1][2] A native of Pittsburgh, Pitassi earned bachelor's and master's degrees at Pennsylvania State University before moving to the University of Toronto for her doctoral studies; she earned her PhD in 1992 from Toronto under the supervision of Stephen Cook.

[7] From September through December 2017, she was a visiting professor at the Institute for Advanced Study.

The goal of this study is to use these bounds to understand both the time complexity of proof-finding procedures, and the relative strengths of different proof systems.

Research contributions that she has made in this area include exponential lower bounds for Frege proofs of the pigeonhole principle,[9] exponential lower bounds for the cutting-plane method applied to propositions derived from the maximum clique problem,[10] exponential lower bounds for resolution proofs of dense random 3-satisfiability instances,[11] and subexponential upper bounds for the same dense random instances using the Davis–Putnam algorithm.

[15] Pitassi was elected as an ACM Fellow in 2018 for "contributions to research and education in the fields of computational and proof complexity".