Oliver Sacks Foundation

Oliver Sacks, M.D,. FRCP, was a physician, a best-selling author, and a professor of neurology at the NYU School of Medicine. The New York Times has referred to him as “the poet laureate of medicine.” As an author, he is best known for his collections of neurological case histories, including 'The Man who Mistook his Wife for a Hat,' 'Musicophilia: Tales of Music and the Brain' and 'An Anthropologist on Mars.' 'Awakenings,' his book about a group of patients who had survived the great encephalitis lethargica epidemic of the early twentieth century, inspired the 1990 Academy Award-nominated feature film starring Robert De Niro and Robin Williams. Dr. Sacks was a frequent contributor to the New Yorker and the New York Review of Books. The Oliver Sacks Foundation is a nonprofit organization devoted to increasing understanding of the human brain and mind through the power of narrative nonfiction and case histories. The foundation’s goals include making Dr. Sacks’s published and yet-unpublished writings available to the broadest possible audience, preserving and digitizing materials related to his life and work and making them available for scholarly use, working to reduce the stigma of mental and neurological illness, and supporting a humane approach to neurology and psychiatry. Recent projects spearheaded by the Sacks Foundation include 'Oliver Sacks: His Own Life,' the award-winning documentary from filmmaker Ric Burns; 'Radiant Minds: The World of Oliver Sacks,' an original podcast series from Audible; and the world premiere of Tobias Picker's opera based on 'Awakenings.' Dr. Laura Snyder is currently writing the definitive Oliver Sacks biography.