Neena Gupta was born in 1984 at Kolkata. Her education from early childhood till PhD research had been in India. She obtained  her PhD  degree, under the supervision of Professor Amartya Kumar Dutta, from the  Indian Statistical Institute in 2012. Earlier, she had obtained her M.Math. (Master of Mathematics) degree from the same institute in 2008. Before that she studied at Bethune College. She did her post-doctoral research at the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research in Mumbai in 2012.

Neena is known for her outstanding contributions to fundamental questions in affine algebraic geometric and commutative algebra, and especially for her complete solutions to the longstanding `Zariski Cancellation Problem' for affine spaces in positive characteristic. Neena began her research career by studying global properties of certain affine varieties whose either local structure, or whose structure of fibres were given. She discovered the structure of locally Laurent polynomial algebras, a beautiful analogue of the theorem on locally polynomial algebras by Bass-Connell-Wright and Suslin, and other results on Laurent polynomial fibrations and related topics. Neena has developed general theories on a certain family of affine varieties which reveal surprising connections between deep questions on affine spaces and provide much sought-after conditions for the varieties to be affine spaces. In particular, she has demonstrated new families of linear hypersurfaces in higher-dimensional affine spaces which satisfy the Abhyankar-Sathaye Conjecture on the Epimorphism Problem. Some of her other significant discoveries include new algebraic characterisations of affine two and three spaces. New examples of non-cancellative varieties, certain K-theoretic properties of the ring of invariants of G_a-actions on affine spaces which she used to settle a question of Miyanishi, new results on the triviality of separable affine three forms, results on retractions of polynomial algebras, and  results and examples around questions on finite generation of algebras arising out of Hilbert's fourteenth problem.

A recipient of several national awards, Neena Gupta became, in 2019, the youngest mathematician ever to be awarded India's highest scientific honour, the Shanti Swarup Bhatnagar Prize. Subsequently, she received the Ramanujan Prize in Mathematics for 2021, awarded jointly by DST, International Mathematical Union (IMU) and the International Centre for Theoretical Physics (ICTP), Trieste. The Honourable President of India conferred on her the Nari Shakti Puraskar in 2022. She was an invited speaker at the International Congress of Mathematicians (ICM) in 2022, in the sections `Algebra' as well as `Algebraic and Complex Geometry'. In 2023, she became a recipient of the Ganita Ratna award from India and the Young Scientist Award of The World Academy of Sciences (TWAS) and Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS).  She has been elected as fellow in the Indian Academy of Sciences and the Indian National Science Academy.