Jean-Jacques Askenasy

Jean-Jacques Askenasy was born in 1929 in Sofia

Askenasy was born in Sofia, Bulgaria, on 13 November 1929. His mother was a homemaker and his father was an accountant.

He earned his medical doctorate with honors from the university in Cluj, Romania, in 1954, and later trained in neurology at the Institute of Neurology of the Romanian Academy. In 1969 he received a Doctor of Science degree from the C. I. Parhon University in Bucharest.

In Romania he headed a neurology department at a university hospital in Bucharest. His requests to leave Romania for Israel were refused 15 times before he immigrated in 1972. In Israel he worked as a neurologist at the Tel Aviv Sourasky Medical Center and did brain research at the Weizmann Institute of Science in 1974 and 1975.

In 1981 he became an associate professor at Mount Sinai in New York, where he studied sleep in Parkinson's disease patients. He later directed the sleep medicine center at Sheba Medical Center and was named a professor in Paris in 1986. From 1995 he was a clinical professor of neurology at Tel Aviv University, where he also taught forensic science at the law faculty.

He wrote 32 books, 22 book chapters and 103 scientific papers on sleep and neurology. He received honors from Israel, Romania, France, Togo and Spain, and he lives in Herzliya.