Vivek graduated from the Indian Institute of Technology Kanpur in 2009 with a five year BS/MS degree in Chemistry. Subsequently, he moved to the southwest United States to Boulder, CO where he worked under the supervision of Prof. David M. Jonas in the Department of Chemistry at the University of Colorado. He graduated in Spring 2014 with a Ph.D. in Chemical Physics. Vivek's Ph.D. thesis focused on theoretical investigations of energy transfer dynamics in natural and artificial light-harvesting assemblies, and experimental determination of absolute pump-probe signal strength. The former work made it to one of four finalists in the APS-DAMOP Best Thesis Award.

Subsequently, he spent one year, 2014-2015, working at Intel's technology development headquarters located in Portland, OR. Apart from climbing a few peaks in the Pacific Northwest, he also designed dark field microscopy experiments for efficient defect detection in the sub-14 nm transistor designs. In September 2015, he joined the group of  Prof. Jennifer Ogilvie in the Department of Physics at the University of Michigan. For his postdoctoral work which exclusively focused on experiments, he built a two-dimensional fluorescence-detected spectrometer which extended the capabilities of current multidimensional experiments to allow spatial resolution improvement from ~ 100x100 micron sq. to ~ 0.5x0.5 micron sq.

In December 2018, Vivek returned back home to join the Indian Institute of Science.