Lakshmanan was a National Merit Scholar and a Radcliffe National Scholar at Harvard University, where she was a magna cum laude graduate in the History of Art and Architecture.

[4] She was a columnist for the Boston Globe, writing about foreign policy and politics, and Newmark Chair for Journalism Ethics at the Poynter Institute.

[6] She also worked at Bloomberg News and for The Boston Globe as a foreign correspondent.

Her Washington Week profile notes[7] that "She has covered presidential campaigns and interviewed leaders in the U.S. and around the world, reporting from 80 countries on six continents.

She has traveled with the campaigns of Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, John McCain, and Mitt Romney,[8] and traveled regularly with Secretaries of State Hillary Clinton and John Kerry for Bloomberg News, and interviewed Clinton more than a dozen times for Bloomberg TV, Radio and Businessweek."