Papri Dey obtained her PhD degree from the Department of Electrical Engineering, Indian Institute of Technology, Bombay. The title of her thesis was "Monic Symmetric/Hermitian Determinantal Representation of Multivariate polynomials." She defended her doctoral thesis on June 27, 2017.

Papri then joined the Max Planck Institute, Leipzig as a visiting scientist. She also worked as a visiting scientist at the R.C. Bose Centre for Cryptology and Security, Indian Statistical Institute, Kolkata. Papri was then offered a semester postdoctoral position at Brown University from September 1 to December 31, 2018, and the Simons-Berkeley Fellowship from January 15 to May 31, 2019, at University of California, Berkeley.