and to follow with an internship at Sibley Memorial Hospital in Washington, D.C. A lifelong interest in research was sparked during medical school.

Kinyoun recruited Parran to join a field team of young physicians under PHS's Leslie L. Lumsden, building privies and surveying conditions in the Southern United States.

In October 1923, he joined a group of young medical officers who attended 6 months of coursework at the Hygienic Laboratory, receiving the practical equivalent of a master's degree in public health.

Parran's first leadership position was as Chief of PHS's Division of Venereal Diseases (September 1926), a program begun during World War I. Parran worked to sway public sentiment away from moral condemnation of venereal diseases and toward consideration of syphilis as a medical condition and threat to public health.

The Columbia Broadcasting System inadvertently launched his campaign after radio executives censored the phrase "syphilis control" from a talk, leading Parran to cancel his appearance.

[7] In addition to syphilis control, Surgeon General Parran left his mark on the scope and structure of public health, both at home and abroad.

Nevertheless, Parran was attacked by American Medical Association editorialist Morris Fishbein for supporting President Truman's proposed national insurance program.

On 1 October 1948, Surgeon General Parran retired from PHS as Vice Admiral to begin a career in academic administration, to serve as the first dean of the new School of Public Health at the University of Pittsburgh.

Parran made Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania a proving ground for ideas developed during his tenure at PHS, recruiting the school's first generation of senior faculty and bringing his deputy surgeon general and veteran international health administrator, James A. Crabtree, who succeeded him as dean in 1958.

Beyond his tenure as Surgeon General, Parran remained prominent in international health, active in the Pan American Sanitary Organization and in Rockefeller Foundation programs.

[3] However, his role in the early part of the Tuskegee study and in the Guatemala syphilis experiments prompted the association to consider renaming the award.

[11] In June 2018, the University of Pittsburgh announced that it would remove Parran's name from the campus building that houses the Graduate School of Public Health due to his involvement in the infamous Tuskegee Syphilis Study which has a legacy of unethical experimentation.

Parran’s role, and the extent of his influence in approving, funding, and providing oversight of the Tuskegee and Guatemalan studies, is not entirely clear.