Scharf earned his B.A. in philosophy at Wesleyan University and his Ph.D. in Sanskrit at the University of Pennsylvania, after which he taught Sanskrit at Brown University for 19 years. Since 2011, he has held several visiting professorships: Visiting Professor at the Maharishi University of Management Research Institute, Chaire Internationale de Recherche Blaise Pascal at the Université Paris Diderot, Visiting Professor in the Department of Sanskrit Studies at the University of Hyderabad, Visiting Professor in the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences at the Indian Institute of Technology Bombay, Visiting Professor at the International Institute of Information Technology in Hyderabad, and Fellow at the Indian Institute of Advanced Study in Shimla. He is also the director of the Sanskrit Library which he founded in 2002. While his research focuses on the linguistic traditions of India, Vedic Sanskrit, and Indian philosophy, he has devoted considerable attention over the past several years to Sanskrit computational linguistics and building a digital Sanskrit library. He is now developing Pāṇinian models of verbal cognition and creating a computation implementation of an XML formalization of Panini's linguistic system.