Crudden earned a Bachelors of Science at the University of Toronto in 1989, working with Mark Lautens, with whom she went on to complete her master's degree.[2] She moved to University of Ottawa for her PhD, working under the supervision of Howard Alper, which she completed in 1995.[3]
In 2015, as Principal Investigator of a group of ten collaborators, Crudden was awarded $8.8 million from the Canada Foundation for Innovation for major infrastructure purchases.[12] She won the Queen's University Research Opportunities Fund, which she used to create inexpensive, sensitive biosensors.[13] Her group prepares carbon-based ligands for metal surfaces, which can be used as sensing systems based on surface plasmon resonance.[13] In 2016, she and Dr. Suning Wang held a trilateral Canada-Japan-Germany symposium at Queen's looking at Elements Functions for Transformative Catalysis and Materials.[14] Crudden is a joint Professor at the Institute of Transformative Bio-Molecules, based out of Nagoya University in Japan, where she runs a satellite lab. She is one of only four international collaborators at this Institute.[15][16] She was recognised as having made the most distinguished contribution to the field of catalysis by the Chemical Institute of Canada in 2018, when they awarded her the Catalysis Award.[16] Crudden also often comments on developments in the field of organic chemistry in various media outlets.[17][18][19][20][21]
^Crudden, Cathleen M.; Alper, Howard (1 June 1994). "The regioselective hydroformylation of vinylsilanes. A remarkable difference in the selectivity and reactivity of cobalt, rhodium, and iridium catalysts". The Journal of Organic Chemistry. 59 (11): 3091–3097. doi:10.1021/jo00090a029. ISSN0022-3263.
^Imao, Daisuke; Glasspoole, Ben W.; Laberge, Véronique S.; Crudden, Cathleen M. (15 April 2009). "Cross Coupling Reactions of Chiral Secondary Organoboronic Esters With Retention of Configuration". Journal of the American Chemical Society. 131 (14): 5024–5025. doi:10.1021/ja8094075. ISSN0002-7863. PMID19301820.