[1] Dr. Posner graduated from the University of Washington with a Bachelor of Science in 1951 and continued there to pursue a degree in medicine which was awarded in 1955.
[2] Dr. Posner has served as chief of the Neuro-Psychiatry Service of the Department of Medicine, chair of the Department of Neurology and currently occupies the George Cotzias Chair of Neuro-Oncology and is professor of neurology and neuroscience at Cornell University Medical College.
He is a member of the Institute of Medicine and served on the advisory council of the National Institute of Neurological Diseases and Stroke (NINDS).
[3] Dr. Posner is also well known for his current research on paraneoplastic disease[4] at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center where he has been a faculty member since 1967.
[3] Along with his contemporary, Dr. Fred Plum, he helped to developed guidelines to help determine how to best treat comatose patients, writing The Diagnosis of Stupor and Coma in 1966, a work described by neurologist Marcus Raichle as having "put stupor and coma on the map as an important consideration in neurology".