Malathi completed her PhD in Statistics at La Trobe University, Melbourne. During her doctoral studies, she developed novel computational algorithms to analyse large-scale omics datasets that utilise known biological pathway and network information to discover disease-associated genes. After her PhD, she did her first postdoctoral placement at the Melbourne Integrative Genomics, University of Melbourne.

In 2019, Malathi joined the Cardiac Cellular Systems laboratory at the Baker Heart and Diabetes Institute as a research fellow to apply her skills on cardiovascular research. Her current research focuses on developing novel computational biology approaches to reveal intercellular communication networks between cardiac cell populations and to understand changes in cardiac cellular networks that contribute to the development of heart failure.