Dr. Parks received her B.S. in Exercise Physiology at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. She then became a research assistant, working on the prevention of atherosclerosis and mechanisms of artery plaque reversal in the Department of Pathology at the University of Washington in Seattle. Moving in 1991 to the University of California, Davis for graduate school, she received her Ph.D. in 1995 from the Department of Nutrition and then became a Postdoctoral Fellow at Berkeley and at UCSF in the laboratory of Marc Hellerstein, an expert in the study of human metabolism with methods such as gas chromatography/mass spectroscopy and mathematical modeling. In 1999, she became an Assistant Professor at the University of Minnesota in the Twin Cities. Her laboratory investigated how healthy humans adjusted to the replacement of dietary fat with carbohydrate and the related mechanisms of fatty liver development in obesity. Following promotion and tenure at Minnesota, Dr. Parks moved to University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center bringing with her one postdoctoral fellow, who along with Dr. Parks, is investigating the effect of the taste of fat in the diet to modulate intestinal and liver metabolism.
