Prof. Pareek is the Executive Director at National Agri-food Biotechnology Institute and Chief Executive Officer, Centre for Innovative and Applied Bioprocessing, Government of India. He is also Professor of Life Sciences at the Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU), New Delhi and Adjunct Professor at the Regional Centre for Biotechnology (under the auspices of UNESCO) in India. The main focus of his research is to understand signaling machinery in plants under osmotic stresses such as salinity and drought. He uses the tools of bioinformatics, functional genomics, transgenics, genome editing and mutation breeding to dissect out the cascades of events leading to stress tolerance in plants, especially the steps involved in osmosensing. Currently, prime focus of his research is on combined stresses and sequential abiotic stresses as experienced by crop plants under the field conditions.
Professor Pareek has numerous awards and honors; to name a few: President of India award for Technology Development, TATA Innovation Award by the Department of Biotechnology, Govt of India, National Academy of Science (NASI)-Reliance Platinum Jubilee Award for Industry Oriented Research in Biological Sciences, Fellowship (FNAAS) from the National Academy of Agricultural Science, Fellowship of National Academy of Sciences (FNASc), and Indian National Science Academy (INSA)-Royal Society (UK) exchange visitors fellowship, 2005.