His professional experience includes the delivery of advanced computing technologies in academic environments. Gurcharan was a member of the ResearchChannel Internet2 Working Group. He served as a member of the Steering Committee and as Liaison to its Middleware Group of NYSGrid, an advanced collaborative cyberinfrastructure for supporting and enhancing research and education. He created and moderated the annual Internet2 Collaboration Special Interest Group and was also the vice chair of the Internet2 Metaverse Working group.

Gurcharan has a special interest and expertise in innovative collaboration tools, the social aspects of technologically connected communities, and the cyberinfrastructure required to support them. He started the first Access Grid nodes at RIT and Dartmouth College. At RIT, he created and directed the Interactive Collaboration Environments Lab housed in the Center for Advancing the Study of Cyberinfrastructure, as a teaching and learning, research and development, practical application, and evaluative studies lab.

As executive director of the Center for Computation & Visualization at Brown University from 2015-2017, Gurcharan had responsibility for leading the growth of research technologies to help faculty researchers compete and succeed in their own fields. The CCV consisted of scientific computing specialists, high performance computing systems staff, and visualization experts. Infrastructure resources consisted of a 7,000 core HPC cluster, a half petabyte of high-speed tiered disk storage, and high performance Infiniband networking connecting fabric for the GPFS file system. A 3D virtual reality system (the YURT) consisted of a 360 degree 140 million pixel display driven by 69 projectors and 20 HPC visualization nodes.

Gurcharan was founding Director of Research Computing at Rochester Institute of Technology from 2005-2015, reporting to the Vice President for Research. He provided the leadership and vision to foster research at RIT by partnering with researchers to support advanced research technology resources in computation, collaboration, and community building. Gurcharan was an Assistant Research Professor in the Ph.D. Program of the Golisano College of Computing and Information Sciences at RIT.

Gurcharan was Associate Director for Research Computing at Dartmouth College from 1995-2004. He was a Member of the Real Time Communications Advisory Group, Internet2 from 2005-2006. He has served as a consultant on several grant proposals to design and implement multipoint collaborative conferencing systems and twice as a panelist for the NSF Advanced Networking Infrastructure Research Program (2001-2002).

His background includes teaching in the Geography Department and supervising the UNIX Consulting Group in Academic Computing at the University of Southern California from 1992-1995 and teaching and research at the University of California, Berkeley from 1980-1992, where he received his Ph.D. in anthropology.