Srijak is an Assistant Professor, Computational Biology and Microbial Ecology cross-appointed with the Centre of Science and School of Computing and Information Systems in the Faculty of Science and Technology. He is also an Adjunct Assistant Professor in the Department of Biological Sciences at the University of Calgary. 

Before starting his position at Athabasca University, Srijak was a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Calgary. Here, he studied the microbial bioremediation of the Arctic Ocean, with a focus on establishing microbial baselines of Canada's Arctic Ocean. 

Srijak got his PhD in Microbiology from the University of California Davis, where he studied the environmental drivers of microbial community structure and function under the supervision of Dr. Jonathan Eisen. 
He also has an MS in Bioinformatics from Georgia Institute of Technology. Here he worked under the supervision of Dr. Joshua Weitz to develop one of the earliest k-mer-based metagenomic binning tools. 

Srijak is also a strong advocate of Open Science and strives to publish all his research output in open-access venues. He is also passionate about science communication and outreach. As a member of Science Outreach Athabasca and a Research Associate with the Arctic Institute of North America, he is involved in knowledge mobilization and translation from high schools to stakeholders and Rightsholders.

His research lab (Enviromics group), is part of the GEMM research labs, co-led with Dr. Casey Hubert and Dr. Marc Strous at the University of Calgary. 

Dr. Bhatnagar is an environmental microbiologist and bioinformatician, studying microbial ecology and function in terrestrial and aquatic ecosystems. His research group uses omics technologies to study environmental contamination and leverages microbial ecophysiological information for environmental monitoring and remediation in natural and controlled systems.