Crudden was appointed a Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council postdoctoral fellow at University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign working with Scott E. Denmark in 1995. She moved to University of New Brunswick in 1996 where she started her own research group. In 2002, she was appointed a Queen's National Scholar and moved her research lab to Kingston, Ontario.
Crudden was the first to identify an enantiospecific Suzuki-Miyaura cross-coupling reaction of chiral boranes. In 2014 she designed more stable nitrogen-based self-assembled monolayer treatments for metal surfaces. The N-heterocyclic carbene self-assembled monolayers can be used in a range of applications, including biosensors. Her interests lie in hydroboration, organometallic chemistry, chiral materials and persistent carbenes. In 2010 Crudden became head of a Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council CREATE award in chiral materials, worth $1.6 million. She became President of the Canadian Society of Chemistry.
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. She won the Queens University Research Opportunities Fund, which she used to create inexpensive, sensitive biosensors. Her group prepares carbon-based ligands for metal surfaces, which can be used as sensing systems based on surface plasmon resonance. In 2016, she and Dr. Suning Wang held a trilateral Canada-Japan-Germany symposium at Queens looking at Elements Functions for Transformative Catalysis and Materials. 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. 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. Crudden also often comments on developments in the field of organic chemistry in various media outlets.