Walther Parson holds an associate professorship at the Institute of Legal Medicine, Medical University of Innsbruck, Austria and an adjunct professorship at the PennState University, PA, USA. Together with his colleagues he set up the Austrian National DNA Database Laboratory in 1997 in Innsbruck, where he currently supervises the High Through-put DNA Database Laboratory and the research group Forensic Genomics.

WP is representing Austria in international boards including the European Network of Forensic Science Institutes (ENFSI) DNA Working Group and the European DNA Profiling Group (EDNAP) and he is an elected active member of the National Academy of Sciences Leopoldina. He served as President of the International Society for Forensic Genetics (ISFG) from 2015-2019 and is currently Vice-President. He received the Scientific award of the German Society of Legal Medicine (DGRM) in 2004 and the Scientific award of the International Society for Forensic Genetics (ISFG) in 2005. WP has co-authored 480 publications with an h-index of 80 (Google Scholar, Nov 2021).

His research focuses on various fields of genetics and genomics, including forensic, medical and population genetics and he entertains collaborations with other fields of research such as anthropology, archaeology, ethics, history and mathematics. His group was repeatedly consigned to handle international requests on Forensic DNA fingerprinting of victims of mass fatalities (e.g., the 2004 Tsunami, the 1973 victims Chile, the 2014 Missing Mexican students), international human identification cases (e.g., the Russian Tsar family Romanov) and identification of individuals of historic interest (e.g., Friedrich von Schiller, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart).