Colin Parrish

Background

About Colin Parrish

Currently the John M. Olin Professor of Virology in the College of Veterinary Medicine at Cornell University. I have a BSc (Hons. 1) from Massey University in New Zealand (Microbiology and Biochemistry) in 1978, a Ph.D. in Virology from Cornell University in 1984, and postdoctoral studies on flaviviruses at Monash University in Melbourne, Australia. Honors include election to the American Academy of Microbiology (2025), US National Academy of Sciences (2023), a Senior Fulbright Fellowship (2016/2017), lifetime achievement award from the American Association of Veterinary Medical Colleges (2017). I was President of the American Society for Virology in 2022 and 2023, and have been an Editor of the Journal of Virology since 2020. I have been on the faculty of Cornell’s College of Veterinary Medicine since 1988, focusing on viral diseases and pathogenesis, virus structure, and virus evolution - including the evolution of new host ranges. I have been involved in many programs trying to understand emerging viruses. My laboratory 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 and the H3N2 strain, which emerged as a variant of an avian virus around 2005. The studies use a wide variety of approaches, ranging from molecular virology, structural biology, cell biology, pathogenesis, and evolutionary analysis.