From 2001 to 2008, she was a graduate student at the Indian Institute of Science in Bangalore, earning her Masters degree in 2004 and her doctorate in the field of experimental condensed matter physics in 2009. She moved to the University of Cambridge in the UK in 2008, where she was awarded a Royal Society Dorothy Hodgkin Fellowship in 2012. Sohini Kar-Narayan was appointed a lecturer at the University of Cambridge in 2015 and a professor in 2018. The ERC awarded her two grants: a Starting Grant in 2015 and a Consolidator Grant in 2023. In 2021, she was the founding director of ArtioSense Ltd, a spin-off from the University of Cambridge. The company develops smart sensors to assist in the positioning of orthopaedic implants during joint replacement surgery.​ For this she has received various awards, most recently the Cambridge Independent Science and Technology Award for Innovation in 2025. In 2021, she was recognized as one of the top 50 Most Influential Women in Engineering by the Women’s Engineering Society. In 2023, she received the Peter Day Prize from the Royal Soci​​ety of Chemistry. In 2024, she was named Innovator of the Year by Electronics Weekly, and in the same year she was elected a Fellow of the UK's Royal Academy of Engineering.​ Professor Sohini Kar-Narayan, Ph.D., has been a director at the Max Planck Institute for Dynamics of Complex Technical Systems in Magdeburg since October 1, 2025.