Jitendra Malik was born in Mathura, India in 1960. He received a BTech in Electrical Engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology, Kanpur in 1980, and a PhD in Computer Science from Stanford University in 1985. In January 1986, he joined the University of California at Berkeley, where he is currently the Arthur J. Chick Professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences. He is also on the faculty of the Department of Bioengineering, and of the Cognitive Science and Vision Science groups. From 2002 to 2004, Malik served as the Chair of the Computer Science Division; he was Department Chair of EECS from 2004 to 2006, and from 2016 to 2017.

Malik's research group has worked on many different topics in computer vision, computational modeling of human vision, computer graphics, and the analysis of biological images. Several well-known concepts and algorithms arose in this research, such as anisotropic diffusion, normalized cuts, high dynamic range imaging, shape contexts, and R-CNN. He has mentored more than sixty PhD students and postdoctoral fellows.

Malik received a gold medal as the top graduating student in Electrical Engineering from IIT Kanpur in 1980, and a Presidential Young Investigator Award in 1989. At UC Berkeley, he was awarded the Diane S. McEntyre Award for Excellence in Teaching in 2000, and held a Miller Research Professorship in 2001. He received the Distinguished Alumnus Award from IIT Kanpur in 2008. His publications have received four Test of Time awards, as well as the Longuet-Higgins Prize for papers published at CVPR and the Helmholtz Prize for papers published at ICCV, twice each. Malik has received the 2013 IEEE PAMI-TC Distinguished Researcher in Computer Vision Award, the 2014 K.S. Fu Prize from the International Association of Pattern Recognition, and the 2016 ACM-AAAI Allen Newell Award. He is a fellow of the IEEE and of the ACM. He is a member of the National Academy of Engineering and of the National Academy of Sciences, and is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.