John Parrish Bio - CIMIT MAIN

John A. Parrish, MD, proudly served in the United States Marine Corps and was a battlefield doctor in Vietnam. He is the Chief Executive Officer and co-founder of the Center for the Integration of Medicine and Innovative Technology (CIMIT), a consortium of academic and engineering research laboratories, universities and more than 40 private-sector companies. Through CIMIT, clinical investigators work to advance the standards of care for all patients through the development and the adoption of targeted medical devices and technologies.  Trained in internal medicine, dermatology and clinical research, Dr. Parrish has been recognized as a visionary and innovator who lists among his accomplishments the development of therapies to treat skin disease, including the now-common use of ultraviolet light. For two decades, Dr. Parrish served as chief of the Department of Dermatology at Massachusetts General Hospital, founding the Wellman Center for Photomedicine, the first – and now the world’s largest – multidisciplinary research group to study the effects of lasers on tissue.

A graduate of Duke University and Yale University School of Medicine, Dr. Parrish is a member of the Institute of Medicine, National Academy of Science, the National Space Biomedical Research Institute and the Defense Science Board. He is the author or co-author or more than 300 publications, including six books.

Dr. Parrish has earned the Discovery Award from the National Dermatology Foundation; the Bowditch Prize from Massachusetts General Hospital for enhancing the quality of patient care while reducing the cost of that care; the U.S. Army’s Thurman Award, honoring the late Gen. Maxwell Reid Thurman, who championed the advancement of lifesaving medical technologies within the U.S. Army; and the American Skin Association's 2011 David Martin Carter Mentorship Award, for being extraordinarily caring and effective in guiding his trainees, and 2011 Humanitarian Award, for his his wide-ranging lifetime professional contributions to the field of dermatology. He is the first individual to have received both the David Martin Carter Mentor and Humanitarian Awards in the 25 year history of the ASA.