Nikhil Srivastava was born New Delhi, India. He attended Union College in Schenectady, New York, graduating summa cum laude with a Bachelor of Science degree in mathematics and computer science in 2005. He received a PhD in computer science from Yale University in 2010 (his dissertation was called "Spectral Sparsification and Restricted Invertibility").
In 2022 The Ciprian Foias Prize in Operator Theory was awarded to Adam Marcus, Daniel Spielman, and Srivastava for their notable work in Operator Theory that was published in the preceding six years.[7][8]