Parish is the daughter of Chris Parish, an immunology professor at
Australian National University. After secondary school at
Narrabundah College in
Canberra, Parish studied physics at Australian National University, graduating with first class honours in 2001. She went to
Pembroke College, Cambridge in England for doctoral study in physics, completing her Ph.D. in 2005. Her dissertation,
Magnetoresistance of inhomogeneous semiconductors, and, ultracold atomic Fermi gases, was supervised by
Peter Littlewood. After postdoctoral research as a Junior Research Fellow at
Churchill College, Cambridge, and then at
Princeton University in the US from 2006 to 2009, she returned to Cambridge in 2009 as an EPSRC Career Acceleration Fellow. By 2012 she had moved to the London Centre for Nanotechnology of
University College London. She took her present position at Monash University in 2015. While an associate professor in 2020, she was named as an ARC Future Fellow. ==Recognition==