Title: This Academic Advisor Is a National Champion Curler

This story is part of Georgetown Faces, a storytelling series that celebrates the beloved figures, unsung heroes and dedicated Hoyas who make our campus special.

By Kelyn Soong

Michael Parker practices what he preaches. 

As an assistant dean for the College of Arts & Sciences, Parker advises more than 200 students in the College majoring in biology and chemistry. He often tells his students that their lives will evolve during their time at Georgetown and continue to do so long after graduation. 

His own journey is a testament to that.

Throughout his life, Parker has been: a soccer player, collegiate runner, Ph.D. student, virologist, professor, administrator, father and even a national champion in curling. 

The Maryland native originally planned to have a career in research. He studied biology at Millersville University of Pennsylvania and earned his Ph.D. in immunobiology from Yale University. But at the end of his Ph.D., he realized that he did not want to work in the lab long term, so he decided to try teaching. He joined McDaniel College in Westminster, Maryland, as an assistant professor of immunology. 

While Parker enjoyed teaching, he realized after his first semester that he also did not want to do that full-time. 

“But there were some things I really liked about it,” Parker said. “I liked the interaction with students and faculty. I liked being engaged in learning and being a part of the university community. I did still like research, just maybe not at the bench. I liked the mentorship of students.”

He eventually found a job that matched his interests and passions in the Dean’s Office at the College of Arts & Sciences, where he began advising science students as an assistant dean in 2019. 

Parker didn’t have plans to become a competitive curler, either. While earning his Ph.D. from Yale, he signed up for a new curling club there in 2012, despite never having curled before. He quickly took to the sport, becoming vice president of the club and one of the team’s best players.

In 2018, his Yale club curling team placed third at the 2018 National College Curling Championship. In 2019, Parker competed on a non-college club team that won a national championship for newcomers to the sport.   

Those achievements were a result of him leaning into the challenge of trying new things, just like he tells his students. 

“At Georgetown, we talk about making well-rounded people, people who are good at, involved in and have experience in many different things,” Parker said. “I realized once I came to Georgetown that I very much fit that mold myself. I’ve always found myself very interested in many things and doing many different activities.”

Learn more about Parker, his passion for curling, his experience as a virologist during the COVID-19 pandemic and what he finds most fulfilling about working at Georgetown.

What drew me from being a professor to an advisor: I get to accomplish things much more often than I did in science. The timelines are just dilated in science. There’s this long-form vision and the path to get there. You take many intermediate steps, but they’re also very incremental. Whereas in my job here, I get to often accomplish 50 or 60 individual tasks per day that help someone or progress something. And I didn’t know that that was something I really liked. When I found this job, I realized that I feel much more accomplished doing those smaller, more closely accomplishable tasks. 

Why Georgetown is a good place to work: The reason that the Dean’s Office has a lot of great people working in it is because of the type of students and faculty that are here at Georgetown. It’s really great to work with people who care a lot about their education and about inquiry. I think people end up liking the atmosphere in the Dean’s office, and they stay for a long time. That’s usually a sign of somewhere being a pretty good place to work.

Curling is harder than it looks: Some people call it chess on ice. I see curling as a sport that requires a high level of precision in an environment that is constantly changing. In curling, you are actively putting your rocks in positions with the understanding and the intent that the next team is going to be throwing, and you must account for their moves and their positioning to allow for you to score or not. So, chess on ice is accurate in that it is a very strategic game, and you’re not always just throwing your shot to try to be the closest to center.

Outside of work: I exercise. I’m a lifelong athlete. I don’t curl competitively anymore … but I enjoy and plan a lot of my life around making sure that I get outside and get exercise. Primarily, that’s running now. I also study biosecurity policy and how we regulate access to the most dangerous pathogens and toxins. I have a research group of undergraduates who help me with that.

My favorite place to eat in the neighborhood: So far, my favorite is Curry & Pie, because I never get to eat Indian food at home! I like the Chicken Tikka pizza.

Something I’ve read that has inspired me: Anthony Fauci’s biography. Just the way he was, across decades and across administrations, able to be a steady force in bringing scientific information to the forefront of policy, making decisions that are based on science, making science obviously apparent and important to people in power, and ultimately driving innovation and discovery that helped to save lives. I think those things are not easy, and he did it for decades in a way that I think very, very few other people could.

Being a virologist during the COVID-19 pandemic: To see the public engage with an ongoing pandemic was quite interesting from an academic standpoint as well as a leadership standpoint. Many more people were asking me questions about viruses, and I think one of the biggest takeaways from that, for me, was the communication that was coming out of the government and the public’s engagement with that. It became really clear to me in those moments the difficulty that the public has with uncertainty.

What brings me joy in my job: I think the most fulfilling thing for me in this job is to see a student who is really bright succeed in figuring out what they want to do. Seeing them have this formed idea of what their next step is, that’s always fulfilling, and especially for the students that I mentor more directly in research, to see them find what it is they want for their next step, and then execute that. That’s really cool.