In the spring of 2001 Parkes was lecturer of Operations and Information Management at the Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania.
[4] From September 2008 to January 2009 Parkes was a visiting professor of computer science at the Ecole Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne, Switzerland.
[2] Parkes founded the EconCS research group within Harvard School of Engineering and Applied Sciences.
Known for his work on incentive engineering for computational systems,[7] early research contributed to the design of combinatorial auctions, procedures for selling complex packages of goods.
He is a member of the scientific advisory committee of the Centrum Wiskunde & Informatica (CWI), Amsterdam, the Netherlands, from 2019.