Oliver Sacks, the neurologist and well-known author, starts a new position at Columbia University this week, as a professor of clinical neurology and clinical psychiatry at the university’s medical school and as the institution’s first “Columbia artist,” The New York Times reported.

Details of the appointment are incomplete, but the newspaper said it would allow Dr. Sacks to range freely across departments, teaching, giving public lectures, seeing patients, and collaborating with other faculty members. He will also teach in the university’s creative-writing department.

Columbia’s president, Lee C. Bollinger, described the hire as part of an effort to bridge the gap between the study of neuroscience and other disciplines. Dr. Sacks’s appointment signifies “a commitment both to having one of the great clinical neuroscientists in our midst and one of the great writers about this subject, but also a commitment to try to take that and reach out to other fields and human activities,” he told the Times.

Dr. Sacks, who had been a clinical professor of neurology at Albert Einstein College of Medicine for 42 years, is scheduled to give his first lecture at Columbia on Friday. —Charles Huckabee