Shivanand was born and brought up in a small town in eastern India. After completing high school in his home town, he joined the Integrated M.Sc. program in the Department of Physics, Indian Institute of Technology, Kharagpur. He received his B.Sc.(Hons.) and M.Sc. in Physics from IIT Kharagpur in 2006. He worked on the design and development of an optically pumped mid-infrared molecular (Ammonia) laser as his M.Sc. project under Dr. P.K. Datta, IIT Kharagpur. His project was awared as the best M.Sc. project in the department. During his undergraduate studies, he had the opportunity to go for several summer internships and work on the latest reaearch topics. He was awared the Summer Undergraduate Research Fellowship by California Institute of Technology (Caltech) in 2005 and got the opportunity to work on the numerical simulation of the LIGO Input Optics under Dr. Sanichiro Yoshida at the LIGO Livingston Observatory during May-July 2005. He is currently pursuing a Ph.D. degree at the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Purdue University. His research interests include the study of electromagnetic waves in materials with a focus on subwavelength imaging and control of light with nanophotonic structures.

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