Short answers, pulled from the story.
Patrick Olivelle is an Indologist, philologist, and scholar of Sanskrit literature born in Sri Lanka. His scholarly work focuses on asceticism, renunciation, and the dharma in the South Asian tradition. He has been Professor of Sanskrit and Indian Religions at the University of Texas at Austin since 1991.
Olivelle received his B.A. with Honours in 1972 from the University of Oxford, where he studied Sanskrit, Pali, and Indian religions under Thomas Burrow and R. C. Zaehner. He then completed his Ph.D. at the University of Pennsylvania in 1974 under the supervision of Ludo Rocher.
Olivelle's Ph.D. thesis, completed at the University of Pennsylvania in 1974, contained a critical edition and translation of Yadava Prakasa's Yatidharmaprakasa. The text deals with the conduct and duties of renunciants in the South Asian tradition.
Olivelle taught in the Department of Religious Studies at Indiana University Bloomington from 1974 to 1991. He then joined the University of Texas at Austin, where he has held the position of Professor of Sanskrit and Indian Religions in the Department of Asian Studies since 1991.
Olivelle specializes in Sanskrit and Pali, the two principal classical languages of South Asian religious literature. He studied both at the University of Oxford as an undergraduate.
The Yatidharmaprakasa is a Sanskrit text by Yadava Prakasa dealing with the rules and conduct of renunciants. Olivelle produced a critical edition and translation of it as his doctoral thesis at the University of Pennsylvania, supervised by Ludo Rocher.