William Lytton M.D.

William W. "Bill" Lytton, M.D., was a physician-scientist and a SUNY Distinguished Professor of neurology at SUNY Downstate Health Sciences University, capping four decades spent studying how the brain works. He died August 6, 2026, at 69, after battling a rare cancer.

Though his career reached across continents as he helped build the field of computational neuroscience, he was happiest, always, coming home to a steak dinner with his wife, Jeeyune, and children Barry, Beatrice, and Grace.

Bill graduated magna cum laude in Chemistry from Harvard College, earned his M.D. from Columbia, and trained at the Salk Institute under Terrence Sejnowski before building a career that published more than 150 papers and produced a textbook to train the next generation of his field. His own take on being named Distinguished Professor was that it was "the last stop before extinguished."

He was a mentor and his impact spanned nations — students, postdocs, and colleagues from Brooklyn to Brazil to Switzerland now credit him with shaping not just their research but how they think. He read as widely as he taught, working through philosophy, history, biology, and theology, and picked up languages the way others pick up hobbies — he spoke seven, and was always learning, or relearning, one more.

Bill had a habit of testing his limits: He flew planes, scuba dove, and took up ice diving in the lakes around Madison, Wisconsin. In 2018, swimming off Cape Cod, he was attacked by a Great White shark and fought his way free.

He recovered fully, running again within a year, and not long after took up biking 40 miles for a far-from-light lunch and an afternoon watching football with his son. He was a Scarsdale fixture on foot regardless of weather, always in a bright orange hat and other neon apparel, convinced that maximal visibility to oncoming cars was well worth whatever embarrassment it cost his family.

He is survived by his wife, Jeeyune; his son, Barry (Claire), of Westport, Conn.; his daughters, Beatrice and Grace, both students at the University of Wisconsin; his siblings, Kate, of Northampton, Mass., and Larry (Janice), of New York City; our Panzer family – mother Carol Panzer, and sisters, Paula (Peter), Sharon Puckett (Mark), and Diane Scrofani (Tony;) his cousins Sidney and Ilene Lipsitz; his friend of 51 years, David Garbowit; and countless colleagues, students, and patients whose lives he touched. He was predeceased by his parents, Sidney Lytton and Alice Winzer Lytton.