Nikhil Srivastava is an associate professor of Mathematics at University of California, Berkeley.

In July 2014, he was named a recipient of the Pólya Prize with Adam Marcus and Daniel Spielman.

He received a PhD in computer science from Yale University in 2010 (his dissertation was called "Spectral Sparsification and Restricted Invertibility").

In 2013, together with Adam Marcus and Daniel Spielman, he provided a positive solution to the Kadison–Singer problem,[4][5] a result that was awarded the 2014 Pólya Prize.

[6] He jointly won the 2021 Michael and Sheila Held Prize along with two others for solving long-standing questions on the Kadison-Singer problem and on Ramanujan graphs.