After spending the 2023-24 academic year as an adjunct professor in Biology at Oceanside Collegiate Academy, Michael Okas joined the OCA staff full-time for the 2-24-25 school year. Okas teaches Biology 101 and 102 for college credit.
A native of Janesville, Wisc., Okas was a three-sport athlete at Edgewood High in Madison as a member of the football, basketball and track teams. He was also involved in theater, winning a state award for best supporting actor in a musical.
Okas attended Loras College in Dubugue, Iowa, earning a degree in Neuroscience in 2016.
Following completion of his undergraduate degree, Okas moved to Chicago where he worked as an Animal Caretaker and DLAR Technician at the University of Illinois at Chicago's research lab. From there he moved to Charleston, SC, in 2017 to work at the Medical University of South Carolina as a Research Specialist.
While working at MUSC, Okas was involved in publishing numerous research articles, including in 2019 an article on
"The abused inhalant toluene impairs medical prefrontal cortex activity and risk/reward decision making during a probabilistic discounting task" in the Journal of Neuroscience. His work on the
"Self-Administration of Toluene Vapor in Rats" was published in Front Neurosci in August of 2020.
Okas enrolled in the Master's program at The Citadel, earning a Master's in Biology in 2023, graduating with distinction and a 4.0 GPA. He began teaching Biology labs to non-major cadets at The Citadel in 2023, the same time as he began teaching Biology as an adjunct professor at Oceanside Collegiate.
In addition to his academic and professional successes, Okas has worked as a football coach in the Life Beyond Sports program at Stall High School where he works with at-risk children in the 6-10 age group on building a healthy lifestyle, the importance of family and mutual respect as well as developing concentration and a strong work ethic.
Okas is also an active director and actor at the Queen Street Playhouse in Charleston, having performed in and directed numerous productions since 2017.
Okas and his wife, the former Rebecca Weatherby of Lilburn, Ga., and the couple lives in Hanahan with their dogs, Ava and Musidorous, and two cats, Salem and Felix Mendelssohn.
