Sudip S. Parikh, Ph.D., 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. In this role, he leads the world’s largest general scientific society and publisher of Science and its family of peer-reviewed journals. Parikh has spent more than two decades at the nexus of science, policy, and business.

An active member of the scientific advocacy community, Parikh serves as a board member and officer for several impactful organizations, including Research!America (which he has chaired since 2023), Friends of Cancer Research, and ACT for NIH. He also serves as co-chair of the Science and Technology Action Committee, Science CEO Group, and the Coalition for Trust in Health and Science. He is also a member of the Committee on Science, Engineering, Medicine, and Public Policy (COSEMPUP) and the Board of Life Sciences of the U.S. National Academies of Science, Engineering, and Medicine. In 2024-25, Parikh chaired the Task Force on a Vision for American Science & Technology (VAST), an initiative of the Science & Technology Action Committee. He led an unprecedented task force of more than 70 leaders from all levels of academia, industry, government, philanthropy, and the non-profit sectors to produce a vision and avenues for action to empower U.S. decisionmakers with a roadmap to ensure the American S&T enterprise remains the vanguard.

Parikh is an elected member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the Council on Foreign Relations. He has also received multiple public service awards, including recognition from the Society for Women’s Health Research, the American Association of Immunologists, the National AIDS Alliance, the Coalition for Health Services Research, the Washington Academy of Sciences, the American Museum of Science and Energy, and the Juvenile Diabetes Research Foundation.

From 2001 to 2009, Parikh served as science advisor to the Republican leadership of the U.S. Senate Appropriations Committee, where he was responsible for negotiating budgets for the National Institutes of Health (NIH), Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality, Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority, and other scientific and health agencies. As a key legislative liaison to the research and development ecosystem, Parikh was on the frontlines of many science policy issues debated during that time, including embryonic stem cell research, cloning, disease surveillance, bioterrorism, cybersecurity, and doubling the NIH budget.

Immediately prior to joining AAAS, Parikh was senior vice president and managing director at DIA Global, a neutral, multidisciplinary organization for healthcare product development. At DIA, Parikh led strategy in the Americas and oversaw DIA programs that catalyzed progress globally toward novel regulatory frameworks for advanced therapies.

Prior to DIA, Parikh was a vice president at Battelle, a multibillion-dollar research and development organization, where he led two business units with over 500 scientific, technical, and computing experts performing basic and applied research, developing medicines and healthcare devices, developing agricultural products, and creating advanced analytics and artificial intelligence applications to improve human health.

Early in his career, Parikh was a Presidential Management Intern at the NIH. He was awarded a National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship while earning his Ph.D. in macromolecular structure and chemistry at the Scripps Research Institute in La Jolla, Calif. There, he used structural biology and biochemistry techniques to probe the mechanisms of DNA repair enzymes. The son of Indian immigrants who worked in the textile and furniture manufacturing plants of North Carolina, Parikh completed undergraduate studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, first as a journalism major before switching into materials science. As a parent of three energetic children, he prioritizes volunteering as a mentor for their Science Olympiad teams.