Susan Parish is Dean of the College of Health Professions and Sentara Professor of Health Administration at Virginia Commonwealth University. She previously served as Dean of the Bouvé College of Health at Northeastern University. At Brandeis University, she was the inaugural Marks Professor of Disability Policy, and founding director of the Lurie Institute for Disability Policy. As an assistant professor of social work at UNC Chapel Hill, she also led the Developmental Disabilities Training Institute.

As dean, her priorities are in diversifying the health care workforce and improving the affordability of health professional education. Parish’s scholarship examines the health and well-being of children and adults with disabilities and their families. Her work has yielded more than 140 peer-reviewed journal articles. Her research has been funded by the NIH, US Departments of Agriculture and Education, and a range of state and foundation sources. She has won numerous teaching and research awards, including the Lifetime Achievement Award from the American Public Health Association Disability Section, the Research Award from the American Association on Intellectual and Developmental Disabilities, and the Distinguished Research Award from the Arc of the United States. She is a Fellow of both the American Association on Intellectual & Developmental Disabilities and the Society of Social Work and Research.

Parish holds a BA in English literature and an MSW from Rutgers University and earned her PhD in Public Health from the University of Illinois at Chicago. She also completed an NIH-funded postdoctoral research fellowship at the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s Waisman Center.