Her areas of expertise include social inequality, political sociology, and social demography. She received her Ph.D. in Sociology from Brown University. Vithayathil was a visiting research fellow with the Harvard STS Program for the 2012–2013 academic year. During her time with the Harvard STS Program, she was working on her dissertation, a qualitative study of the production of social data during a contemporary census in India. This research draws upon the contributions of science, technology and society (STS) studies, political sociology, and India area studies to explore the network of actors involved in producing official data.