Vinayak Vishnu Pagar was born in Maharashtra (India) in 1983. He obtained his BSc and MSc degrees in chemistry from the University of Pune (India) in 2004 and 2006, respectively. From 2006–2010, he worked as Research Associate in pharmaceutical companies like Jubilant Chemsys Ltd. and Ranbaxy Laboratories Ltd. (India). In 2010, he stated his PhD degree in National Tsing Hua University (Taiwan) and completed it in 2014. Subsequently, he worked as a postdoctoral fellow in the same group for one year. Currently, he is working as a Research Scientist at The Ohio State University, Columbus, Ohio USA.

His research focused on the development of new organic reactions by using transition-metal catalysis such Gold, Silver, Rhodium, Zinc, Cobalt, Nickel and Copper metals which enables mild, diastereoselective, enantioselective and efficient transformations of variety of readily available substrates to wide range of synthetically useful nitrogen and oxygen containing heterocyclic products which are medicinally important.