Abhay Parekh received a B.E.S. in Mathematical Sciences from Johns Hopkins University in 1983, an S.M. in Operations Research from the Sloan School of Management at MIT in 1985, and the Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science from MIT, where he was affiliated with the Laboratory for Information and Decision Systems. After obtaining his doctorate, Dr. Parekh was a postdoc with the MIT Laboratory for Computer Sciences.

Before coming to the EECS Department at U.C. Berkeley as an Adjunct Professor in 2003, Dr. Parekh spent a number of years in industry (AT&T Bell Laboratories, T. J. Watson Research Center IBM, Sun Microsystems) working on various research problems, mostly in the area of computer networking. He was co-founder, as well as President and CEO of San Francisco-based FastForward Networks, which developed products to enable the large-scale distribution of broadcast video on the Internet. In 2000, FastForward Networks was sold to Inktomi, where its technology and products formed the basis of Inktomi's content networking offerings. After the merger, Dr. Parekh remained with Inktomi for a brief time as General Manager of the Media Products Division. From 2002-2008, he was associated with Accel Partners, an early stage venture capital firm as a Venture Partner. In 2009, he founded Flowgram, Inc. Since 2014 he has been with Lytmus Inc and serves as co-founder and CEO.

Prof. Parekh's papers on generalized processor sharing, which is a way of achieving quality of service in data networks, are among the most highly cited in the networking literature. In particular, his paper co-authored with Robert G. Gallager, "A generalized processor sharing approach to flow control in integrated services networks: The single-node case" was the recipient of the IEEE Communication Society's William Bennett Prize Paper Award in 1994 "for the best original paper published in the IEEE/ACM Transactions on Networking in the past year." (A preliminary version of the paper received the Best Paper Award at INFOCOM 1993.) In 2002, the IEEE Communications Society selected it as one of the 16 most influential papers on networking to appear in the last 50 years. Prof. Parekh is also a co-author of two patents. He is co-author (with Jean Walrand) of the book "Resource Sharing in Networks" which was published in 2014.

After spending some years focusing on the nature of interference in wireless communication systems, he is now trying to understanding large distributed peer to peer systems in the context of multimedia networks and MOOCs. He carries out this research at the Wireless Foundations Center.