Neeraj Kayal was born and brought up in Guwahati, India. He was awarded the National Talent Search Scholarship, as well as the Jagadis Bose National Science Talent Search (Junior) Scholarship, both in 1996. He was also selected for Indian National Mathematics Olympiad in 1997. Kayal graduated with a B.Tech from the Computer Science Department of the Indian Institute of Technology, Kanpur (IITK), India in 2002. In that year, he, Manindra Agrawal and Nitin Saxena proposed the AKS Primality Test, which attracted worldwide attention, including an article in the New York Times. This research remarkably came out as a part of undergraduate study.

Neeraj is a very gifted individual. Besides doing excellently in his field of study, computer science, he has also demonstrated his talent in mathematics. Neeraj was also selected for Indian National Mathematics Olympiad, 1997. He was awarded the National Talent Search Scholarship, as well as the Jagadis Bose National Science Talent Search Scholarship, both in 1996. What, however, distinguishes him from the majority, is the motivation and dedication to work at hard problems. By carrying out the outstanding work on primality testing, Neeraj has undoubtedly done IIT Kanpur and its alumni immensely proud. He, along with his team members, has demonstrated in the most decisive fashion that the very best possible research work can be done at IIT Kanpur.

He was given the Distinguished Alumnus Award of the IITK, for his work in computational complexity theory. He has been awarded the prestigious Gödel prize for the same along with his co-authors. Kayal was also a two time awardee of the Dr.Subratananda Dowerah Gold Medal awarded annually by the Assam Academy of Mathematics. Kayal received his PhD in theoretical computer science from the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at the Indian Institute of Technology, Kanpur. He did a post-doctoral from Rutgers University. He is currently working as a Researcher with the Microsoft Research India.