Rate My Professor Neeti Parashar

Neeti Parashar is a Professor of Physics in the Department of Chemistry and Physics at Purdue University Northwest, formerly Purdue University Calumet. She earned her Ph.D. in High Energy Physics from the University of Delhi in 1995, completing her thesis on intermittency, moments, and correlations in high energy interactions in just two years with five international peer-reviewed publications. She also holds an M.Sc. in Physics (1991, merit position, ranked 4th out of 200) and a B.Sc. (Honors) in Physics (1989, merit position, ranked 7th out of 400) from the University of Delhi. Her career includes postdoctoral research at Northeastern University (1997-2002), an INFN Fellowship in Pisa, Italy (1995-1997), assistant professorships at Louisiana Tech University (2002-2005) and Purdue University Calumet (2005-2008), promotion to tenured Associate Professor (2008-2012), and full Professor since 2012. Parashar founded and leads the Center for High Energy Physics at PNW, serving as principal investigator on NSF grants exceeding $2 million for research on the DZERO experiment at Fermilab and the CMS experiment at CERN.

Her research specializes in experimental particle physics, contributing to major discoveries such as the Higgs boson, as co-author on key papers including “Observation of a new boson at a mass of 125 GeV with the CMS experiment at the LHC” (Physics Letters B 716, 2012), “Combined Measurement of the Higgs Boson Mass in pp Collisions at √s = 7 and 8 TeV with the ATLAS and CMS Experiments” (Physical Review Letters 114, 2015), and “Measurements of the Higgs boson production and decay rates and constraints on its couplings from a combined ATLAS and CMS analysis” (Journal of High Energy Physics 1608, 2016). With over 1,900 peer-reviewed publications and more than 143,000 citations, she has significantly impacted the field. Major awards include the 2024 American Physical Society Fellowship for CMS contributions and mentorship, 2025 Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics (CMS Collaboration), 2019 European Physical Society Prize in High Energy Physics (DZERO Collaboration), Purdue University Calumet Outstanding Faculty Scholar (2008, 2013), and Outstanding Faculty Teacher (2013). As faculty mentor for the PNW QuarkNet Center, she provides outreach and training to high school teachers and students, and supervises postdocs and undergraduates conducting research at CERN and Fermilab.