Anand Srivastav studied Mathematics and Physics at the University of Münster. In 1988 he completed his doctoral dissertation in Mathematics, with focus on Functional Analysis. Thereafter he changed the research focus to Discrete Mathematics and Optimization and in this respect he was holding postdoc und assistant professor positions at University Bonn, University of Minnesota, New York University, Yale University and FU Berlin, where he completed the habilitation 1996 in computer science, with focus on algorithmic discrete mathematics.

Since 1997 he has been professor for Discrete Optimization at the Engineering Faculty of Kiel University, Department of Computer Science. Anand Srivastav is speaker of the research platforms in the cluster of excellence ‘Future Ocean’. In 2013 he has been awarded the Indo-German Max Planck guest professorship of the Max-Planck-Society (MPG).