{"doi":"10.1002/mds.30078","title":"Ira Shoulson, <scp>MD</scp> (1946–2024)","abstract":"On May 12, 2024, our community lost a tireless champion of innovation for patients and families with movement disorders. Ira Shoulson, MD, was a source of inspiration, hope, and solace for clinicians, investigators, study participants, colleagues, and, always, his patients. Ira's training, after an undergraduate degree at the University of Pennsylvania, began at the University of Rochester School of Medicine & Dentistry, where he fell under the influence of George Engel, MD, an internist/psychiatrist and the father of the biopsychosocial model of medicine, a patient-centered approach that considers psychological and social as well as biological factors as contributors to health. Dr. Engel was renowned for his perceptive and revealing interviewing skills, and Ira carried that ability throughout his career. After 2 years of internal medicine training in Rochester, he spent 2 years at the NIH, primarily with Tom Chase, MD (a pioneer in the neuropharmacology of Parkinson's disease), and then another 2 years back in Rochester as a neurology resident, followed by a year as chief resident in both medicine and neurology. He then introduced the Movement Disorders program at Rochester under the acronym (he had a penchant for them) the MIND (Movement and Inherited Neurological Disorders) Unit. His first recruit to help in caring for outpatients was a registered nurse, a first for the institution. The hospital restrictions confined her official duties to obtaining weights and blood pressures, values Ira prized above all other data save the history. We never observed Ira engage with a patient, whether in the clinic or hospital, without a warm, direct handshake, a set of postural blood pressures, and an assessment of weight. After that, the engaging conversation began, always in an unhurried and illuminating fashion. Ira used to joke that early on the nurse was allowed to take only blood pressures and weights, and once he was a professor that was all anyone let him do. Ira was a relentless innovator. In 1987 he was awarded the first NINDS grant for a multicenter, randomized controlled trial of putative neuroprotective agents in Parkinson's disease: deprenyl (now called selegiline) and tocopherol (vitamin E), a project that became the DATATOP study. To facilitate the work he founded a nonprofit, academic collaboration, the Parkinson Study Group (PSG), whose core tenets were the free and unrestricted right to publish (facilitated by holding the database), democratic governance, and disclosure of conflicts of interest (a novel idea for the time). DATATOP and the PSG became engines for progress in Parkinson's disease. In the course of the design and execution of the trial, the PSG developed the methods, rating scales, and outcome measures that continue to drive the field today. The PSG also built a novel culture of inclusion among investigators and coordinators in Parkinson research studies; research coordinators were always included in both the design and analysis phase of studies. This fostered an environment where junior faculty and new coordinators could build their skill and confidence over time, and many eventually became leaders in the field in their own right. PSG trials were directly responsible for the approval of seven new drugs to treat Parkinson's disease. Ira was also a cornerstone of research efforts to find new treatment for Huntington's disease. With Nancy Wexler, PhD, and Anne Young, MD, PhD, he spent more than 10 years traveling to northwestern Venezuela, evaluating patients and family members and collecting samples from the largest-known Huntington cohort. The work involved difficult conditions and impoverished environments, but Ira had a relentless enthusiasm for finding treatments for this devastating disease. The work in Venezuela led to the discovery of the HD gene, in 1993, and soon after Ira, together with Jack Penney, MD, founded the Huntington Study group. Using what they had learned from the PSG, they developed rati","journal":"Movement Disorders","year":2024,"id":506972,"datarank":0.0,"base_score":0.0,"endowment":0.0,"self_citation_contribution":0.0,"citation_network_contribution":0.0,"self_endowment_contribution":0.0,"citer_contribution":0.0,"corpus_percentile":null,"corpus_rank":null,"citation_count":0,"citer_count":0,"citers_with_citation_signal":0,"citers_with_endowment":0,"datacite_reuse_total":0,"is_dataset":false,"is_dataset_confidence":0.9505,"is_data_producer":false,"deposit_databanks":null,"is_oa":true,"file_count":0,"downloads":0,"has_version_chain":false,"published_date":"2024-01-01","fair_score":null,"fair_percentile":null,"algorithm_id":"datarank_citation_only_1hop_v6","ranking_scope":"data_only","authors":[{"id":246444,"name":"Karl Kieburtz","orcid":"0000-0002-1645-6921","position":1,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":230245,"name":"David G. Standaert","orcid":"0000-0003-2921-8348","position":0,"is_corresponding":true}],"reference_count":0,"raw_metadata":null,"created_at":"2026-07-19T02:10:58.484528Z","pmid":"39628363","pmcid":null,"fwci":null,"citation_percentile":null,"influential_citations":0,"oa_status":null,"license":null,"views":0,"total_file_size_bytes":0,"version_count":0,"fair_f":null,"fair_a":null,"fair_i":null,"fair_r":null,"fair_zscore":null,"fair_rationale":null,"fair_model":null,"fair_agent_version":null,"fair_fulltext_source":null,"fair_has_llm":null,"fair_computed_at":null,"clinical_trials":[],"software_tools":[],"db_accessions":[],"linked_datasets":[],"topics":[]}