His research interests are in systems, especially for big data analytics, cloud computing and datacenter networks. He has also been known to dive deep into theoretical problems arising out of building practical systems. His research thus integrates systems, networks, and theory. Agarwal recently completed postdoctoral work at UC Berkeley, where he led the Succinct project. He completed his PhD at the University of Illinois – Urbana Champaign (UIUC) and was awarded the 2012 UIUC Rambus research award for outstanding performance in computer science and engineering research. He recently gave an invited talk at a workshop for distributed computing at the ACM Principles Of Distributed Computing 2016.