Tom Parks received his bachelor's degree in electrical engineering from Cornell in 1961. He worked for
General Electric for two years, then returned to Cornell to earn his masters and PhD degrees in 1964 and 1967, respectively. Upon graduation he joined the electrical engineering faculty at
Rice University in
Houston, Texas, where he began teaching and working in the nascent field of digital signal processing. In 1972 he and
James McClellan published
an influential paper on digital filter design. In 1986 Parks returned to Cornell, where he spent the remainder of his career and retired as emeritus professor. Parks received multiple awards based on his research focused on digital signal processing with its application to
signal theory, multirate systems,
interpolation, and filter design. He co-authored more than 150 books and papers. == Affiliations and awards ==