Dr. Yuksel Named Among Houstonia Magazine’s Top Doctors for 2023
Sancak Yuksel, MD, associate professor in the Department of Otorhinolaryngology at McGovern Medical School at UTHealth Houston, has been named by his peers as a Top Doctor for 2023 by Houstonia magazine. Dr. Yuksel is a pediatric otolaryngologist and an adult otologist-neurotologist and lateral skull base surgeon who treats complex medical and surgical cases in these subspecialties. He also is subspecialized in sialendoscopy for salivary gland stones and strictures, and is one of a handful of surgeons who perform these procedures in the nation.
A native of Turkey, Dr. Yuksel received his medical degree at Hacettepe University School of Medicine in Ankara in 1992, after six years of study plus an extra elective year of English preparation. He completed a year of internal medicine residency and then completed residency training in otolaryngology at Cerrahpasa Medical School at Istanbul University.
Afterwards, he completed advanced fellowship training in head and neck surgery, skull base surgery, and otology-neurotology. Three years into his advanced training, Dr. Yuksel decided to go to the U.S., where he served as a research fellow in the Basic Science Laboratory of the Children’s Hospital of Pittsburgh, working on numerous National Institutes of Health-funded projects focused on the middle ear and Eustachian tube pathophysiology. His original plan was to return to Turkey, but when the hospital awarded him the Lester A. Hamburg Endowed Fellowship in Pediatric Otolaryngology, he and his family stayed. During that time, he also served as an instructor at the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine.
“I was happy to find the missing pediatrics piece of my training, and in doing so, I discovered my calling,” he says. “If you’re an ENT seeing a child, you’re the ultimate referral. Even the best pediatrician may miss a simple problem with hearing that has the potential to lead to a developmental delay. Often just a 15-minute surgery makes a huge difference in a child’s life.”