Assistant Professor
Division of Infectious Diseases
Dr. Parr is an Assistant Professor in the Division of Infectious Diseases of the University of North Carolina School of Medicine Department of Medicine. He received his B.S. in chemistry from Stanford University, followed by his M.D. at the University of Virginia School of Medicine, where he was elected to Alpha Omega Alpha. Dr. Parr’s interest in the infectious diseases of poverty took shape at UVA during his time in Dr. Richard Guerrant’s lab at the UVA Center for Global Health, where he designed and tested a new real-time PCR assay for Cryptosporidium.
Following medical school, Dr. Parr completed residency in internal medicine at Harvard’s Brigham and Women’s Hospital. He was selected for the Doris and Howard Hiatt Residency in Internal Medicine and Global Health Equity, through which he received an M.P.H. from the Harvard School of Public Health and performed clinical work abroad in Haiti, Rwanda, Guatemala, and Peru. During residency, he studied drug-resistant tuberculosis in Peru with Dr. Mercedes Becerra and colleagues at Partners In Health. Dr. Parr joined the Brigham and Women’s Division of Global Health Equity after residency and continued this work as a clinical instructor at Harvard Medical School. He subsequently moved to UNC to complete a fellowship in infectious diseases and recently joined the faculty.
Dr. Parr’s research in the Infectious Disease Epidemiology and Ecology Lab at UNC (IDEEL@UNC) continues to focus on the infectious diseases of poverty, with translational projects addressing malaria and viral hepatitis infection in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC). He recently led a multi-disciplinary effort to describe two clusters of malaria parasites in the DRC with a genetic mutation that makes them undetectable by commonly used rapid diagnostic tests and was invited to serve on a 2016 World Health Organization expert panel to formulate a response to these parasites. He also attends on the infectious diseases inpatient services at UNC Hospital and serves as Associate Editor for global health for Healthcare: The Journal of Delivery Science and Innovation.
