Dr. Thiruvathukal holds a Ph.D. in Computer Science from the Illinois Institute of Technology in Chicago, Illinois. He attended there from 1988-1995, where he also completed the M.S. in 1990. His research from the very beginning was about object-oriented approaches to parallel programming and involved the development of object models, languages, libraries, and tools for parallel programming, mostly based on C and C++ on Unix platforms. This culminated in two computing systems, Enhanced Actors and Distributed Memo, which was one of the first documented, working object-oriented parallel libraries for parallel programming. 

In industry, Dr. Thiruvathukal worked as a member of the technical staff at Tellabs and R.R. Donnelley and Sons Technical (Research) Center. where he was a software development manager working in their Metromail division, which is now a part of Experian, on advanced research and development.

Dr. Thiruvathukal's research is and has been funded by grants from the National Science Foundation, DARPA, and the National Endowment for the Humanities. He has also received corporate support from Hostway Corporation in Chicago, Microsoft Corporation, and Hewlett-Packard.