Professor Adhikari holds the position of Professor of Engineering Mechanics at the James Watt School of Engineering of the University of Glasgow. He received his PhD in 2001 as a Jawaharlal Nehru Memorial Trust scholar at the Trinity College from the University of Cambridge. In 2010 he Received the Wolfson Research Merit Award from the Royal Society (UK academy of sciences). He was an Engineering and Physical Science Research Council (EPSRC) Advanced Research Fellow (2004-09) and winner of the Philip Leverhulme Prize (2007) in Engineering (given to an outstanding scholar under the age of 35).

Professor Adhikari did his BEng and MSc from The University of Calcutta (now Indian Institute of Engineering Science and Technology (IIEST), Shibpur) and Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore in 1995 and 1997 respectively. He was the holder of the inaugural Chair of Aerospace Engineering at the College of Engineering of Swansea University (from April 2007 - September 2021). Before that, he was a lecturer at Bristol University (January 2003 - March 2007) and a Junior Research Fellow at Fitzwilliam College, Cambridge (2001-03). Since 2015 he has been a Distinguished Visiting Professor at the University of Johannesburg. He was a visiting Professor at Carleton University (Canada, 2006) and a visiting scientist at the Los Alamos National Laboratory (USA, 2006). In 2008 he was an official visitor to the Cambridge University Engineering Department and a visiting Fellow of Fitzwilliam College, Cambridge. Between 2016 to 2019, he was a visiting Professor at the University of Paris East (France), The University of Texas at Austin (USA), Rice University (USA), Ecole Centrale de Lyon (France), IIT Kanpur (India), and The Central South University in Changsha (China).