Parashar leads the $100 million One-Utah Responsible Artificial Intelligence Initiative (One-U RAI), driving translational AI for societal good while ensuring privacy, fairness, and accountability. As Faculty Co-Director of Data Science & Ethics of Technology (DATASET), he shapes the University of Utah’s data science strategy and fosters a transdisciplinary AI ecosystem. He also contributes to the National Data Platform (NDP), advancing federated data collaboration and responsible AI innovation.

As Office Director at the US National Science Foundation’s Office of Advanced Cyberinfrastructure, Parashar oversaw NSF’s investments in the exploration, development, acquisition, and provisioning of cutting-edge national cyberinfrastructure resources, tools, services, and expertise. His leadership was instrumental in advancing and transforming science and engineering through next-generation cyberinfrastructure. His vision’s key focus was ensuring equitable access and democratizing its use and impact. During his tenure, he developed NSF’s strategic vision for a National Cyberinfrastructure Ecosystem for 21st Century Science and Engineering, ensuring it adapts to rapidly evolving technological and application landscapes, with a core focus on equitable access and democratization of cyberinfrastructure’s use and impact. He also played a pivotal role in several key NSF and national initiatives, co-leading programs such as Harnessing the Data Revolution (HDR) and Public Access, co-chairing the National Artificial Intelligence Research Resource (NAIRR) Task Force in collaboration with the U.S. White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP), led the National Artificial Intelligence Research Resource Task Force, the National Science and Technology Council (NSTC) Subcommittee on the Future Advanced Computing Ecosystem (FACE), is a member of the NSRC Subcommittee on Open Science (SOS) and is part of the leadership of the COVID 19 HPC Consortium. and leading the development of the strategic blueprint for NSF’s cyberinfrastructure investments over the next decade.

As Assistant Director for Strategic Computing at the US Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP), Parashar led the development of a national strategy for the Future Advanced Computing Ecosystem (FACE), the establishment of the NSTC FACE Subcommittee, and the formulation of the National Strategic Computing Reserve (NSCR).

At the regional level, Parashar co-founded the New Jersey Big Data Alliance, bringing together academia, government, and industry to address data challenges, and led state legislation to support this activity. At Rutgers, he led strategic planning for cyberinfrastructure, created and led the Rutgers Office of Advanced Research Computing, and founded and led the university-wide multidisciplinary Rutgers Discovery Informatics Institute. At the University of Utah, he is the Director of the Scientific Computing and Imaging (SCI) Institute and one of the Faculty Directors for the One Utah Data Science Hub.

Parashar served two terms as Editor-in-Chief of ACM Transactions on Autonomous and Adaptive Systems, has served in leadership roles on steering, organizing, and programming committees of numerous ACM and other conferences/workshops, and is on the editorial boards of key journals, including the ACM Computing Surveys. He is the Founding Chair of the IEEE Computer Society Technical Consortium on High Performance Computing, Editor-in-Chief of the IEEE Transactions on Parallel and Distributed Systems (where he established its reproducibility initiative), and chaired the IEEE Computer Society Ad-Hoc Committee on Open Science and Reproducibility. He is a Member of the Computing Research Association’s Computing Community Consortium (CCC) Council. He has also served in leadership roles in the various community technical committees (such as TCPP and TCSC), where his focus has been on establishing reward structures for recognizing excellence applied parallel and distributed computing, especially at the earlier career level. He has also contributed to curriculum development.

Parashar has played a leadership role in national projects such as the Ocean Observatories Initiative facility and the Northeast Big Data Hub.