His parents, Meyer and Vitsche Nudelman, the name was officially changed in 1947 from Nudelman to Nuland had emigrated to Bessarabia in the early 20th centurv. Sherwin B. Nuland Nuland was a graduate of The Bronx High School of Science, New York University and Yale School of Medicine, where he obtained his M.D. degree and also completed a residency in surgery. His 1994 book How We Die: Reflections on Life's Final Chapter was a New York Times Best Seller and won the National Book Award for Nonfiction, as well as being a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. In 2011 Nuland was awarded the Jonathan Roads Gold Medal of the American Philosophical Society, for "Distinguished Service to Medicine". Nuland wrote non-academic articles for The New Yorker, The New York Times, TheNew Republic, Time, MITTechnology Review and the New York Review of Books. He was a fellow of the Hastings Center, an independent bioethics research institution. Nuland was also one of the featured lecturers at One Day University. In 2005, Nuland produced a series of lectures for the Teaching Company's The Great Courses on the history of Western medicine titled Doctors: The History of Scientific Medicine Revealed Through Biography. His TEDx talk "remains one of the most powerful moments in the conference's history" in TED's Curator, Chris Anderson version.