Michael S. Cookson, MD,MMHC

About Michael Cookson

Michael Cookson, M.D. is Professor and Chairman of Urology at the University of Oklahoma College of Medicine and Chief of Urology at the Stephenson Cancer Center. He is board certified in Urology by the American Board of Urology and is one of the states only fellowship trained Urologic Oncologists, having completed his training at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York City.

Before moving to Oklahoma in 2013, he was the Vice Chair of Urology at Vanderbilt University. He is one of the nations most experienced surgeons and is an internationally recognized leader in Urologic Cancer. He served as the 2019-2021 President of the Society of Urologic Oncology. Dr. Cookson is the Donald D. Albers Chair of Urology and serves at the Director of Robotic Surgery at OU Health University of Oklahoma Medical Center.

He has a busy clinical practice, that includes diagnosing and managing and treating patients with prostate cancer, bladder cancer, kidney cancer and other urological cancers. For localized prostate cancer detection, he is a champion of MRI-guided fusion biopsy, and in addition to robotic assisted radical prostatectomy he is experienced in minimally invasive treatments including cryotherapy and HIFU.

He is also an advocate for men with advanced prostate cancer and works in a multidisciplinary clinic to treat men with androgen deprivation therapy in combination with AR targeted therapies, chemotherapy and radiation therapy.

For bladder cancer patients, he helped pioneer blue light cystoscopy and offers a range of intravesical therapy and immunotherapy for patients with noninvasive bladder cancer. For patients with invasive bladder cancer, he has performed more than a thousand radical cystectomies with urinary diversions that include neobladder, both open and laparoscopic robotic assisted. For kidney cancer treatment, partial nephrectomy and radical nephrectomy are performed both open and laparoscopic robotic assisted. He also has access to clinical trials and actively enrolls eligible patients at Stephenson Cancer Center.

He is a world-leading urological surgeon and has performed thousands of robotic-assisted laparoscopic procedures using the da Vinci Surgical System. He is recognized as a world-renowned expert on urologic oncology with over 270 peer reviewed published papers to his credit; he is on such lists as America's Top Doctors, Oklahoma’s Best Doctors. He is one of only 75 U.S. Urologists elected to membership in the prestigious American Association of Genitourinary Surgeons. He was given the American Urologic Association’s Presidential Citation for outstanding contributions to the field of urologic oncology.

Dr. Cookson is often featured as an expert in local and national media. Read a recent article on Prostate PSA by 405 Magazine.

• Bladder cancer
• Blue light cystoscopy for bladder cancer detection
• Cryotherapy
• Immunotherapy
• HIFU
• MRI-guided fusion biopsies for prostate cancer detection
• Prostate cancer
• Renal cancer
• Robotic-assisted radical prostatectomy
• Robotic and minimally invasive surgeries
• Testicular cancer
• Urinary diversion