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Michael S. Okun (born July 5, 1971) is an American neurologist, neuroscientist and author. He is the co-founder and director of the Norman Fixel Institute for Neurological Diseases at UF Health (2019-current) and is also the chair of the Department of Neurology at the University of Florida (2015-current) and the Medical Director/Advisor for the Parkinson's Foundation (2006-current).

Education
Okun received his bachelor's degree in history from Florida State University in 1993 and received his M.D. with honors from the University of Florida in 1996. He completed a residency in neurology and served as the chief resident at the University of Florida (1995-6). He was fellowship trained in movement disorders and physiology for movement disorders surgery by Mahlon DeLong and Jerrold Vitek at Emory University in Atlanta GA.

Career
After completing his fellowship training, Okun co-founded the movement disorders program at the University of Florida in 2002 with neurosurgeon Dr. Kelly D. Foote. Okun opened his laboratory (2002) located at the McKnight Brain Institute on the University of Florida Campus. The goals of his laboratory were to uncover the underpinnings of human tic in Tourette syndrome, explore non-motor basal ganglia circuitry and to innovate neuromodulation and circuit-based treatments for human disease.

Okun recognized that some diseases lacked animal models which would recapitulate the human condition(s). He advocated and implemented a neuroethics-based approach to utilize the operating room and the outpatient clinic setting for research into these neurological conditions. The Okun laboratory originally focused on Tourette syndrome because of the paroxysmal nature of human tic, which made it ideal to explore the physiological underpinnings of the movement disorder.

His work has been important in understanding the biological changes underpinning the neural network changes which underpin the symptomatic benefits of deep brain stimulation and for moving toward symptom and circuit based treatments rather than disease based treatments. Okun has trained over 70 clinical MD fellows and many researchers in basal ganglia and related disorders. His laboratory has included well-known scientists and trainees in the field including Justin Sanchez Ph.D., Ayşegül Gündüz, Ph.D. and Kelly D. Foote M.D.

Okun and the University of Florida based group performed a series of National Institutes of Health, foundation and philanthropically funded experiments between 2002 and 2022 that resulted in the successful characterization of human tic physiology.

Deep Brain Stimulation (DBS)
Okun founded a multi-center multi-country Tourette syndrome international publicly available deep brain stimulation database which was funded by the Tourette Association of America. The international project has been credited with improving care through information sharing and advancing research. The effort led to a recent of surgical recommendations.

Okun has championed an effort to achieve FDA approval for Tourette and has been a vocal advocate, along with the neuroethicist Jim Giordano at Georgetown University, for reform in policies to improve access for neurological devices in rare and small disease populations. Okun, Foote and Gündüz were featured on an episode of Vital Signs with CNN’s Sanjay Gupta, who scrubbed in to the operating room with the team and explored their approach to innovating new therapies for Tourette syndrome.

The work from the Okun laboratory has resulted in many advances in the field. Okun, Foote and Wayne Goodman performed the first NIH funded case of obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) DBS at the University of Florida in 2003.

Okun, along with the neuropsychologist Dawn Bowers, was the first to fully characterize the DBS induced smiling response from stimulation in the human nucleus accumbens region.

Along with one of his former fellows, Dr. Ihtsham Haq, they showed it could be used as a response predictor for obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) DBS surgery.

Okun designed and carried out one of the first large prospective randomized Parkinson's disease trials comparing the two most common DBS brain targets. The study, known as the NIH COMPARE trial, revealed unilateral STN or GPi DBS resulted in similar motor benefits, however there were important advantages and disadvantages for using each brain target. An editorial in Archives of Neurology, The Rematch, raised the question that would later shift the future of DBS care to symptom specific profiles.

Okun, Vitek, DeLong and Foote were widely criticized in the field for their early use of the GPi DBS target, however following multiple international studies, the use of the target has become mainstream and the field has shifted toward more about symptom specific deep brain stimulation profiles, as opposed to being disease specific.

Later, the large Vetterans' Affairs prospective multicenter DBS study was published.

• Ramirez-Zamora, Adolfo; Giordano, James; Gunduz, Aysegul; Alcantara, Jose; Cagle, Jackson N.; Cernera, Stephanie; Difuntorum, Parker; Eisinger, Robert S.; Gomez, Julieth; Long, Sarah; Parks, Brandon (2020). "Proceedings of the Seventh Annual Deep Brain Stimulation Think Tank: Advances in Neurophysiology, Adaptive DBS, Virtual Reality, Neuroethics and Technology". Frontiers in Human Neuroscience. 14. [https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fnhum.2020.00054/full doi:10.3389/fnhum.2020.00054/full. ISSN 1662-5161.] The imaging protocol was named after the University of Florida “gator” mascot. Okun, Foote and Bova all hold multiple patents for DBS and brain surgery related interventions.

Okun and Foote embraced the idea of the operating theater being used to conduct human experiments. Together, they were among the first to describe several human intraoperative stimulation induced effects, including smile, panic , pseudobulbar affect and most recently memory flashbacks. The two doctors had an early awareness that the misuse of the technology could lead to future ethical issues.

Okun and Foote introduced the neuroethical guiding principle for the appropriate use of deep brain stimulation; “it should only be applied to alleviate human suffering,” which was laid out in a 2015 TEDx talk. Their work on the ethics of DBS and psychosurgery has been covered in the Smithsonian magazine by David Noonan and also featured in the movie Hunting for Hedonia by Danish filmmaker Pernille Rose Grønkjær.

Okun and Foote co-founded the Deep Brain Stimulation Think Tank in 2012. The original idea for the DBS Think Tank was to gather approximately 50-100 of the top experts in the field and to lock them in a room, drive collaboration, share information, catalyze cutting edge innovation and to proactively address the ethical issues involved in current and future neuromodulation. The DBS Think Tank has grown into an important coalition of experts advocating for device access and reimbursement. The group has been active with the NIH, the FDA and payor systems. The members of the tank, which include doctors, scientists, engineers, patients and other stakeholders work together to drive dialogue on cutting-edge technologies and also to address the neuroethics of brain implants. There is an annual DBS think tank proceedings paper released each year following the meeting.

Norman Fixel Institute for Neurological Diseases at UF Health
Okun is credited with coining the phrase, “the patient is the sun and we should orbit around the patient.” In 2002 he and Foote founded the Program in Movement Disorders at the University of Florida. Since that time the program has transformed into a “model for care and research,” with many international visitors. It has grown from program to center to institute and finally to the Norman Fixel Institute for Neurological Diseases (2019).

Their original vision was a one-stop patient-centered clinical-research experience for both national and international patients. This model for care and research delivery was published in JAMA Neurology and has been referred to as the service and science hub model of care. The model includes the ideas that care should be conducted all under one roof, every patient should be a clinical patient and a research patient (enrolled in a database) and there should be access to clinical trials.

Okun, along with Professor Bastiaan Bloem (Nimegen, Netherlands) and Ray Dorsey (University of Rochestor, NY) have been vocal advocates for building better models for interdisciplinary care for Parkinson's disease inclusive of virtual telemedicine visits.Okun is known as a strong patient advocate for Parkinson's disease and has promoted multidisciplinary care worldwide through his role Medical Director/Advisor role with the Parkinson's Foundation and through his patient facing blog which offers tips for those with the disease.

The University of Florida INFORM database, which spawned from the service and science hub effort, has become one of the largest real-world Parkinson's and movement disorders databases in the world, and is managed by Charles Jacobson. The database was used as one of the models for the Parkinson's Foundation QII Parkinson's Outcome Project for which Okun served as a founding steering committee member during its creation.

Parkinson’s Foundation
In his role as the medical director for the Parkinson's Foundation, Okun was instrumental in leading interdisciplinary research across Parkinson's Foundation Centers of Excellence, particularly in the area of hospitalization and he was part of the group to devise and to distribute over 100,000 Aware in Care Hospitalization bags. The contents of the Aware in Care kits can now be freely downloaded and have been used by thousands of people to prevent medical errors and to protect Parkinson's patients during hospitalizations.

Awards
Okun has been recognized with many awards and accolades including as the top clinical-researcher at the University of Florida College of Medicine (2021) and he was also recognized in a 2015 White House ceremony by the Obama administration as a Champion of Change for Parkinson's Disease.