Nikil Jayant grew up in Bangalore, India. He obtained his BSc in Physics and Mathematics from Mysore University and the BE and PhD degrees in Electrical Communications Engineering from the Indian Institute of Science. As part of his doctoral program, he was a Research Associate at Stanford University.

During 1968-98, Nikil Jayant worked at Bell Laboratories, Murray Hill, New Jersey, as part of the Bell System, AT&T, and most recently, Lucent Technologies. Dr. Jayant began his Bell Labs Career as a Member of Technical Staff in the Acoustic Research Department and later served as the Supervisor of its Voice Coding Group. Subsequently he created and served as the Department Head for the Signal Processing Research Department and the Advanced Audio Technology Department. He later served as the first Director of the Multimedia Communications Research Laboratory and as Multimedia Director at Bell Laboratories.

Dr. Jayant was on the faculty of the Georgia Tech School of Electrical and Computer Engineering from 1998-2013. He was the Executive Director of the Georgia Centers for Advanced Telecommunications Technology (GCATT), the Director of the Georgia Tech Broadband Institute (GTBI), and the Director of the Multimedia Communications Laboratory. He is also a co-founder of an ATDC company (acquired by Arris Corporation), EGT, and a VentureLab/ATDC company VQLink. Nikil Jayant's hobbies include table-tennis, classic cars and the theater.