Biography

Dr. Parks is a Professor of Pathology in the Section on Lipid Sciences at the Wake Forest University School of Medicine. He is also the Director of the Molecular and Cellular Pathobiology Graduate Program, which is an interdisciplinary PhD graduate program that focuses on the molecular mechanisms of complex diseases, such as heart disease and cancer. His lab has three National Institutes of Health (NIH)-funded projects that focus on the interrelationships of lipoprotein metabolism, dietary fat type, inflammation, and atherosclerosis (i.e., hardening of the arteries). To accomplish the goals of these grant projects, Dr. Parks uses an interdisciplinary approach that includes transgenic/gene targeted mouse models, molecular biology, cell biology, biochemistry, mass spectrometry, and vascular wall biology.

Dr. Parks received his undergraduate degree in chemistry at North Carolina State University in 1973. He received his MS (1976) and PhD (1979) degrees from Wake Forest University, where he studied the impact of dietary polyunsaturated fat on lipoprotein metabolism in non-human primates. He then studied the influence of saturated and polyunsaturated fats on the physical chemical properties of plasma and lymph lipoproteins during a two year postdoctoral fellowship (1979-1981) at the Biophysics Institute at Boston University School of Medicine. Dr. Parks received additional training, on sabbaticals, in nuclear magnetic resonance spectroscopy at the Swiss Institute of Technology, Zurich, Switzerland (1986) and in gene targeting at University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill (1999-2000).

Dr. Parks has served on study sections for the National Institutes of Health, the American Heart Association, and the Tobacco Related Disease Research Program, University of California, Berkley. He also served on the Scientific Advisory Board of the Academic Research Initiation Grants Program of the North Carolina Biotechnology Center from 1991-1993. He is currently a member of the Leadership Committee of the Arteriosclerosis, Thrombosis, and Vascular Biology Council of the American Heart Association. He has published more than 100 peer reviewed articles and 13 book chapters.