one of the founders of sleep science and medicine. Bill devoted his life to helping the public appreciate the importance of sleep health. His pioneering work, which included the discovery of rapid eye movement (REM) sleep, touched countless lives. Born in Wenatchee, Washington, in 1928, Bill earned a bachelor's degree from the University of Washington in Seattle in basic medical science in 1951. He then started medical school at the University of Chicago, where he conducted groundbreaking work even before receiving his M.D. in 1955 and his Ph.D. in neurophysiology in 1957. He earned his medical license at Mount Sinai Hospital in New York City and then stayed on to continue his sleep research. In 1963, Bill joined the psychiatry department at Stanford University in Stanford, California, where he remained for the rest of his career. Bill first encountered sleep research at the University of Chicago, where he joined the lab of physiologist and sleep researcher Nathaniel Kleitman. A fellow graduate student, Eugene Aserinsky, had begun to study eye movements in sleep in 1953. Bill helped discover and describe REM sleep, a term he later coined. From 1954 through 1957, he described the relationship between REM sleep and dreaming, established the all-night sleep patterns in human beings, discovered REM sleep in animals and newborn babies, and demonstrated that the patterns of specific rapid eye movements are related to the visual dream experience. Upon completion of his internship at Mount Sinai Hospital, Bill obtained a research grant to establish a sleep laboratory, which he housed in his apartment. His ingenuity and persuasive powers were evident in the grant stipulations: Because the sleep research took place at night and he needed to be near his young family, the funding covered half of his apartment rent. Among the research subjects coming to his sleep research lab were members of the Radio City Rockettes. In 1960, he published a paper in Science based on that work, in which he described the effect of dream deprivation. In 1963, Bill developed a sleep research program at Stanford that drew international attention. He collaborated with many of the scientists who would move the new field forward, including neurophysiologists Michel Jouvet and Christian Guilleminault. In 1970, he opened the Stanford Sleep Disorders Clinic. Bill invented the term polysomnography to convince insurance companies to reimburse patients for the costs of clinical sleep studies. This coding change, from experimental treatment to sanctioned medical procedure, marked the beginning of the modern field of clinical sleep medicine.