[1][2][3] He received the Shanti Swaroop Bhatnagar Award in 2004 and the Infosys Prize in Life Sciences 2010.
[4][5] Chitnis is the former principal investigator of the malaria research group at the International Centre for Genetic Engineering and Biotechnology (ICGEB) in New Delhi.
[6] Chitnis completed his Master of Science in physics at Indian Institute of Technology Mumbai in 1983.
Subsequently, he obtained a Master of Arts in physics from the Rice University in Houston, in 1985 and a doctor of philosophy (PhD) from the University of California-Berkeley in 1991[6] after which he worked at the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Maryland as a Fogarty International Fellow from 1991 to 1995.
Furthermore, his research group is involved in the studies of molecular signaling during the blood stage of Plasmodium falciparum, especially the process of invasion and egress from erythrocytes.