Author Biographies

Dr. Parnell (Par) Donahue was born in 1938 on a farm near Westbrook, Minnesota, the third child in a family of nine. Believe it or not, he attended a one-room school house where one teacher taught all eight grades! He earned his medical degree from Marquette University School of Medicine, now Medical College of Wisconsin. He was a General Medical Officer in the USAF before his specialty training in pediatrics. He practiced pediatrics, adolescent medicine, and adolescent sports medicine in Hartford and Milwaukee, Wisconsin, and in Atlanta, Georgia.

Dr. Donahue is the author of the popular Germs Make me Sick, a book about childhood illnesses, and Sports Doc, one of the first sports medicine books and the first one directed to high school and college athletes.

Par (as he likes to be called) is a master gardener. He enjoys playing golf, reading, wood-working, cooking for friends and family, and is currently learning to play the bag pipe. Since his retirement he has volunteered at Salvus, a clinic for underinsured children; taught at-risk teens in an after-school program; and served on the board of CASA, a program which advocates for kids who, through no fault of their own, end up in the court system. He was recently elected to the parish council at his church.

He and his scientist wife Mary live in Brentwood, Tennessee, near their three sons, all of whom are on the faculty at Vanderbilt's School of Medicine. Their daughter Maura teaches international business and is the director of The Program for Christian Leadership at the University of Dayton in Ohio. They have thirteen grandchildren between the ages of ten and nineteen.

Par is a member of the Irish and American Pediatric Society, the American Academy of Pediatrics, and a past member of the AMA, the Society for Adolescent Medicine, the American College of Sports Medicine, the Georgia Chapter of the Academy of Pediatrics, and the Wisconsin Chapter of the Academy of Pediatrics.