C.R. Ramakrishnan's areas of research are logic programming and formal methods. He has worked, and continue to work, on the analysis of temporal properties of concurrent systems by encoding the system semantics as logical inference rules, and formulating the analysis problem as one of performing inference over these rules. He works on various aspects of inference in logic programs, ranging from incremental evaluation to data structures and constraints. He also works on specification languages of concurrent systems, especially those that deal with mobile systems, and on model checking of such systems. His work also involves the application of model checking and program analysis techniques to computer security. His research has been consistently funded by grants from the NSF and the ONR.

At present he is working on systems that combine statistical and logical knowledge: ways to represent such knowledge, perform inference over such knowledge and learn aspects of such knowledge. An application of such a combined statistical/logical system is the verification of probabilistic concurrent systems.