I don't think serde has a built-in format for that file format.
I would just write some code to parse it manually. The file format seems relatively simple. I do not think you would gain anything from trying to use a crate to build the parser.
I mean, I'm sure you could do this with nom. If you are already familiar with nom, that might be a good option, but I could probably write a custom parser a lot faster than I could learn to use nom.
As for multi-threading, don't bother. This is not really the kind of task that multi-threading tends to be useful for.
Perhaps, I'm not familiar with that parser. But writing a multi-threaded parser that is faster than a single-threaded one for something like this is probably really really hard. Certainly there isn't a parser crate out there to help you with that.
That depends on the type of degree. It certainly wouldn't be for a bachelor's degree, but it would be for a PhD.
As for how you publish articles about parsers, well, like any other kind of article. You write up the article, and submit it to a conference or journal that accepts articles on the topic of parsers.
I would ask someone in academia who works with parsers which conference/journal is appropriate for the article I have in mind. Alternatively, I would try to find recent articles about parsers and look where they are published.
I suspect that many computer science conferences/journals have parsers as one of the topics they publish about.