Sudip Parikh, PhD, became the 19th Chief Executive Officer of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) and Executive Publisher of the Science family of journals in January 2020. Parikh has spent two decades at the nexus of science, policy, and business.
Immediately prior to joining AAAS, Parikh was Senior Vice-President and Managing Director at DIA Global, a neutral, multidisciplinary organization bringing together multiple stakeholders interested in healthcare product development. He led strategy in the Americas and oversaw DIA's programs that catalysed progress globally toward novel regulatory frameworks. Prior to DIA, Sudip was General Manager of the Health and Consumer Solutions Business Unit and Vice-President at Battelle. There, he led a $150 million business unit with over 500 scientific, technical, and computing experts developing medicines and healthcare devices. From 2001 to 2009, Parikh served as science advisor and professional staff to the U.S. Senate Committee on Appropriations, where he was responsible for negotiating budgets for the National Institutes of Health, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and other scientific agencies. Parikh was on the frontlines of many science policy issues debated during that time, including embryonic stem cell research, cloning, disease surveillance, and bioterrorism.
Parikh was awarded a National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship while earning his PhD in macromolecular structure and chemistry from the Scripps Research in La Jolla, California. There, he used structural biology and biochemistry techniques to probe the mechanisms of DNA repair enzymes bound to DNA. The son of Indian immigrants who worked in manufacturing plants of North Carolina, Parikh completed undergraduate studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.