Pavithra Prabhakar obtained her doctorate in Computer Science from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 2011, from where she also obtained a masters in Applied Mathematics. She has a masters degree in Computer Science from the Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore and a bachelors degree from the National Institute of Technology, Warangal, in India.

Pavithra joined the faculty of the IMDEA Software Institute in 2011. She took a one-year leave of absence (August 1 2011 to August 31 2012) at the California Insitute of Technology as a CMI (Center for Mathematics of Information) fellow. She has also spent several summers as an intern at Bell-Labs, Murray Hill, working on formal synthesis of web-services.

She is the recipient of the Sohaib and Sara Abbasi fellowship from UIUC and M.N.S Swamy medal from the Indian Institute of Science.

Her main area of research is in Formal Analysis of Cyber-Physical Systems. She has published widely in Hybrid Systems and Formal Methods conferences and her paper in HSCC has received an honorable mentions award.