• Executive Director of CIMIT

Dr. Parrish is the executive director and founder of CIMIT, the Center for Integration of Medicine and Innovative Technology. A Boston-based consortium of major teaching hospitals, engineering schools and research laboratories, CIMIT brings together financial resources, scientific insights and business expertise from leading academic and industry participants. CIMIT’s mission is to catalyze innovations that will have a major beneficial impact on healthcare. Under his leadership, CIMIT has evolved into a highly successful consortium of academic and engineering research laboratories, universities and more than 60 private-sector companies. (Consortium members are Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, Boston Medical Center, Boston University, Brigham and Women’s Hospital, the Charles Stark Draper Laboratory, Children’s Hospital Boston, Harvard Medical School, Massachusetts General Hospital, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Newton-Wellesley Hospital and Partners HealthCare.) 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. Under the leadership of Dr. Parrish, the first international affiliate of CIMIT was established at the University of Manchester, UK.

Each year, CIMIT selects 30-40 multidisciplinary research teams to develop novel technologies while transcending barriers in regulation, intellectual property and business development. In doing so, CIMIT annually extends close to $5 million in support. CIMIT-backed projects have led to the formation of 10 sustainable ventures, more than 200 invention disclosures, 75 of which have resulted in 80 patent applications, 500 peer-reviewed publications and more than $150 million in supplemental grants.

In early 2008, Dr. Parrish retired from several high-level posts including chief of the Massachusetts General Hospital Dermatology Service, chairman of the Harvard Medical School Department of Dermatology, director of the Wellman Center for Photomedicine, and director of the MGH-Harvard Cutaneous Biology Research Center. He is devoting his full-time effort to CIMIT.

A graduate of Duke University and Yale University School of Medicine, Dr. Parrish’s training was in internal medicine, dermatology and clinical research. He served in the Marines, and was a battlefield doctor in Vietnam. After leaving the service, Dr. Parrish has spent 30 years conducting and directing basic research in lasers, photobiology and cutaneous biology. He has more than 300 publications, including six books.

Dr. Parrish founded the first, and now the world’s largest, multidisciplinary research group to systematically study the basic nature of laser effects on tissue, the Wellman Center for Photomedicine. He is a member of the Institute of Medicine, National Academy of Science, and the National Space Biomedical Institute. He was recently honored (with R. Rox Anderson, MD, of MGH) with the Discovery Award, bestowed by the national Dermatology Foundation, and the Bowditch Prize, given by Massachusetts General Hospital to an outstanding practitioner who enhances the quality of patient care while reducing the cost of that care.