He is currently the Lola England de Valpine Professor of Applied Mathematics, Organismic and Evolutionary Biology and Physics at Harvard University.

His work centers around understanding the organization of matter in space and time (that is, how it is shaped and how it flows, particularly at the scale observable by the unaided senses, in both physical and biological systems).

Mahadevan graduated from the Indian Institute of Technology, Madras, and then received an M.S.

He started his independent career on the faculty at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1996.

In 2000, he was elected the inaugural Schlumberger Professor of Complex Physical Systems in the Department of Applied Mathematics and Theoretical Physics, and a professorial fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge, University of Cambridge, the first Indian to be appointed professor to the Faculty of Mathematics there.