Colin R. Parrish

Colin R. Parrish, Ph.D. is the John M. Olin Professor of Virology in the College of Veterinary Medicine at Cornell University. He is a member of the National Academy of Sciences, and has been an editor at the Journal of Virology since 2019.  He is a BSc (Hons.) graduate of Massey University in New Zealand where he majored in Microbiology and Biochemistry. A Ph.D. in Virology from Cornell University in 1984 was followed by postdoctoral studies on flaviviruses at Monash University in Melbourne, Australia. He has been on the faculty of Cornell’s College of Veterinary Medicine since 1988. He has been Councilor for Veterinary Virology and for Virus Evolution and President of the American Society for Virology. He was recipient of a Senior Fulbright award in 2016 and 2017. Dr. Parrish’s research focuses on viral diseases and pathogenesis, virus structure, and virus evolution – including the evolution of new host ranges for naturally emerging viruses. His laboratory mainly studies parvoviruses and influenza viruses. The canine parvovirus is a virus similar to a cat virus, which transferred to dogs in the 1970s to cause an ongoing global pandemic of disease. The two canine influenza viruses studied include one derived from the H3N8 equine influenza virus which emerged in dogs around 1999, and the H3N2 strain, which emerged as a variant of an avian virus around 2005. The studies in his laboratory use a wide variety of approaches, ranging from molecular virology, structural biology, cell biology, epidemiological analysis, studies of viral pathogenesis, and evolutionary analysis.