You should add parse_dates=True, or parse_dates=['column name'] when reading, thats usually enough to magically parse it. But there are always weird formats which need to be defined manually. In such a case you can also add a date parser function, which is the most flexible way possible.
Suppose you have a column ‘datetime’ with your string, then:
from datetime import datetime
dateparse = lambda x: datetime.strptime(x, '%Y-%m-%d %H:%M:%S')
df = pd.read_csv(infile, parse_dates=['datetime'], date_parser=dateparse)
This way you can even combine multiple columns into a single datetime column, this merges a ‘date’ and a ‘time’ column into a single ‘datetime’ column:
dateparse = lambda x: datetime.strptime(x, '%Y-%m-%d %H:%M:%S')
df = pd.read_csv(infile, parse_dates={'datetime': ['date', 'time']}, date_parser=dateparse)
You can find directives (i.e. the letters to be used for different formats) for strptime and strftime in this page.