Venkat received his Bachelor's degree from the Indian Institute of Technology at Madras in 1997 and his Ph.D. from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 2001 under the supervision of Madhu Sudan. He was a Miller Research Fellow at the University of California, Berkeley during 2001-2002. His research interests include the theory of error-correcting codes, approximation algorithms for optimization problems and corresponding hardness results, algebraic algorithms, explicit combinatorial constructions, and pseudorandomness.