Aparna A Wagle Shukla, MD : Research

Dr. Aparna Wagle Shukla is a neurologist with goals to provide the highest quality care to patients with Parkinson's disease, dystonia, tremors, chorea, and many other movement disorders. In addition to seeing patients, she has experience and proficiency in administering botulinum toxin injections for treating dystonia, sialorrhea, migraines, and spasticity. She is also an active member of the deep brain stimulation (DBS) surgery program at the University of Florida, which is world-renowned. DBS is a highly effective treatment for patients with Parkinson's disease, essential tremor, dystonia, Tourette syndrome, and obsessive-compulsive disorder. Since 2012, she has been involved in the interdisciplinary meeting for the preoperative selection of DBS candidates. She has provided expertise for microelectrode recording in the operation room for accurate electrode placement in the brain and actively participated in their outpatient programming of DBS settings.

In addition to clinical practice, she is committed to researching movement disorders in many ways. She is working on many projects to elucidate the mechanisms underlying movement disorders and develop novel therapeutic approaches. She has conducted multiple studies on the novel applications of oral pharmacological therapies, botulinum toxin injections, transcranial magnetic stimulation, and deep brain stimulation surgery. She is working on increasing the applications of rehabilitation therapies for treating movement disorders. She has been awarded numerous grants through the Dystonia Coalition, Dystonia Medical Research Foundation, Brain and Spinal Cord Injury Research Trust Fund, Blepharospasm Research Foundation, National Organization for Rare Disorders, and the National Institute of Health sponsored NINDS K23 and R01NS122943 (Principal investigator) to pursue the research interests. She has been invited to present her research findings at national and international meetings. She has over 150 publications in many prestigious peer-reviewed journals, including Brain, Neurology, Journal of Neurology, and Neurosurgery and Movement Disorders. She is currently the division director of clinical trials and the Research Chief. The movement disorders center is commonly selected for conducting multicenter trials for developing better therapies for essential tremor, dystonia, Parkinson's disease, Huntington's disease, and Tourette syndrome. She is also the clinical director for Tyler's Hope Foundation for Dystonia and the Vice President for the Tremor Research Group. She has been honored and awarded for her academic impact in numerous ways. She is frequently invited to be a reviewer at the NIH study sections. She has been inducted as an associate editor for Nature Parkinson's Disease Journal and the Drugs in Context journal.