He received his B.Sc. degree in T.D. College campus; and both M.Sc. (1970) and PhD (1976) degrees from Banaras Hindu University in condensed matter physics. Singh was awarded Humbold Fellow in Stuttgart University from 1979 to 1981. Between 1981 and 1985 he was a Research Associate and Lecturer at McGill University. From 1982 to 1983 he worked in High Magnetic Field Lab, Université Paul Sabatier as a visiting scientist. He also worked as Research Associate at University of North Carolina.

He joined the University of Western Ontario as associate professor in 1985, and currently is a professor of physics there researching nanoscience. 

He was also a visiting professor at Texas Center for Superconductivity from June till November in 1992. He also worked as a chief researcher at Superconductors Division of Hitachi, Tokyo between November 1992. During May and August in 2022, he became Fulbright US-Canada Research Chair in Vanderbilt University.

His visiting positions include Texas Center for Superconductivity (1992), University of Oxford (1993-1994), and Dubna and Ioffe Institute Saint Petersburg (2019).