She is a professor in the Institute of Mathematics and Informatics of the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences.
As a high school student, Kiryakova competed for Bulgaria in the 1969 International Mathematical Olympiad, earning a bronze medal.
She earned a Ph.D. in 1987, with the thesis Generalized Operators of Integration and Differentiation of Fractional Order and Applications,[1] and completed a Dr.Sc.
(habilitation) in 2010, with the thesis Generalized Fractional Calculus and Applications in Analysis, supervised by Ivan Dimovski.
[1] Kiryakova is the author of the research monograph Generalized Fractional Calculus and Applications (1993).