A major goal of his research is to understand the structure of big spatial computations underlying societal grand challenges.
Shekhar is currently serving as a co-editor in chief of Geo-Informatica journal[18] and general co-chair of the 2023 SIAM International Conference on Data Mining.
[20] Furthermore, he served as the President of the University Consortium for GIS (UCGIS) leading a call for action to include spatial perspective in data science courses and curricula.
[25] Also, he served on the CRA Computing Community Consortium Council coordinating the initiative to organize Blue Sky Ideas track at conferences to encourage out of box thinking.
For contributions to geographic information systems (GIS), spatial databases and spatial data mining, Shekhar was elected an IEEE Fellow (2003)[26] as well as an American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) Fellow[27] and received the IEEE Computer Society Edward J. McCluskey Technical Achievement Award (2006)[11] as well as the UCGIS Education Award.
He also received the Research Partnership Award (2006, 2021)[13] from University of Minnesota Center for Transportation Studies and was elected a Fellow of the Institute on Environment (2011).