Born in Newport News, Va., in 1937, Parrish joined the service following high school, serving for four years in the U.S. Air Force as in instructor in air traffic control. He received an honorable discharge in 1958 and enrolled at the University of Virginia, Charlottsville, where he would ultimately earn bachelor's, master's, and doctoral degrees in electrical engineering.
During his junior year, he left the university to work as a senior computer analyst and group leader at Amerad Corp. in Charlottesville. Over the next two years, he headed a team that developed software for modeling and computer graphics. Shirley Johnson, a fellow programmer at Amerad and a 1961 graduate in mathematics from Vanderbilt University, would become his wife in 1963.
He returned to the university, completing his bachelor's degree in 1964 and beginning work on his master's degree. For two years he was a research associate with the Research Laboratories for the Engineering Sciences within the School of Engineering and Applied Sciences. From 1966 to 1968 he held a NASA Traineeship, which funded his research in pattern recognition.
After receiving his Sc.D. in 1968, Parrish joined the faculty of the university's Department of Electrical Engineering. He continued to expand his work in pattern recognition and image processing (his publications list now totals more than 100 journal articles) and to serve as principal investigator or co-investigator on more than two dozen research contracts or awards.
In 1978 he was appointed chair of the department and served in that capacity until the end of 1986. During that time he hired several new faculty members, many of whom have taken on positions of leadership in the department and the university. He continued his research, developed several new courses, led the development of the graduate program, and oversaw the development and deployment of a distributed computer environment for the entire university.
He joined Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tenn., in 1987 as Centennial Professor of Electrical Engineering and dean of the School of Engineering. He helped increase the size and quality of the engineering school in order to propel it to national prominence.
Parrish's accomplishments as a researcher and an engineering educator led to his election as a Fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) in 1986. Within the IEEE, he has held numerous positions at the national level. Most recently, he served as president of the IEEE Computer Society (1988), as a member of the Board of Directors (1990-93), and as vice president for educational activities and member of the Executive Committee (1992-93). He is currently editor-in-chief of IEEE Computer.
He is also a recognized authority on engineering education and accreditation. In 1983 he began serving as a program evaluator for programs in electrical engineering and computer engineering. In 1986 he was appointed to the IEEE Committee in Engineering Accreditation Activities. He has served on the Engineering Accreditation Commission (EAC) of the Accreditation Board for Engineering and Technology (ABET) since 1989, chaired its Criteria Committee for three years, and has been a member of its Executive Committee since 1991; he has just completed his term as chair of the EAC.
In recent years, Parrish played a leadership role in the EAC's efforts to develop new criteria for evaluating engineering programs. The criteria focus on outcomes (what students learn) instead of process (what courses are taught), a philosophy that is also the hallmark of the WPI Plan. The criteria are undergoing a two-year comment period and will come before the ABET board for final approval later this year. This fall, WPI is serving as one of two national testbeds for the new criteria.
He is a member of the honor societies Tau Beta Pi, Eta Kappa Nu and Sigma Xi. He is listed in Who's Who in Engineering and many other such registries. He is a licensed Professor Engineer in the Commonwealth of Virginia.