R. Duane Cook, MD, MMM, is a board-certified cardiothoracic surgeon at UF Health Cardiothoracic Surgery – Leesburg.
Dr. Cook attended medical school at the University of Texas Medical Branch in Galveston. He then entered the U.S. Army, where he completed his general surgery residency at Brooke Army Medical Center in San Antonio, Texas. Dr. Cook served as a general surgeon in Landstuhl, Germany, later deploying to Saudi Arabia with the 31st Combat Support Hospital during Desert Storm. He completed his cardiovascular and thoracic surgery residency in 1994 at Walter Reed Army Medical Center in Washington, D.C., and in 2018 earned a masters in medical management (an MMM, known as the MBA for health care) from Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.
Prior to joining UF Health, Dr. Cook practiced with the Ocala Heart Institute for 20 years. He helped establish the open-heart program in Leesburg in 1998, and later assisted with developing new heart programs in Inverness, Venice, Winter Haven and Stuart, Florida.
He has also taken several teams to Tanzania, East Africa to perform open heart surgery at Kilimanjaro Christian Medical Center.
In addition to his surgical expertise, Dr. Cook is board-certified by the American Board of Surgery and the American Board of Thoracic Surgery, and is a fellow of the American College of Surgeons.