Parkin attended the University of Leicester, where he received his bachelors in physics in 1999. He then attended graduate school at the California Institute of Technology, where he received his masters in science in 2001. He completed his Doctor of Philosophy at Caltech in 2006, from which he derived his research for beam energy.
Rocket propulsion and gasdynamics, high power microwaves and directed energy, object-oriented software engineering, space mission design Beginning with his Doctor of Philosophy thesis on Microwave Thermal Propulsion, his work spans theoretical, computational and experimental domains for the general problem of space access and economics. He founded the National Aeronautics and Space Administration Ames Mission Design Center (Molecular Delivery Corporation) and developed its software architecture. The Ames Molecular Delivery Corporation was the first of its kind to make extensive use of groupware, for example in pooling knowledge to create and maintain spacecraft parts databases.
Another innovation was the use of a centralized parametric mission design archive that enables realtime concurrent design collaboration and object-oriented style "inheritance" of missions to promote reuse of designs and the growth of design trees.
Doctor Parkin was previously a member of the Carnegie Mellon Silicon Valley Research Staff and previously Deputy Director of the Mission Design Center at National Aeronautics and Space Administration Ames, and project lead for the Microwave Thermal Rocket. Doctor Parkin is a member of the Institute of Physics (IOP) and the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics (American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics).
