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Nathaniel Kleitman |
Nathaniel Kleitman (April 26, 1895 – August 13, 1999)12 was Professor Emeritus in Physiology at the University of Chicago. Author of the seminal 1939 book Sleep and Wakefulness, he is recognized as the father of American sleep research. Kleitman, along with his student Eugene Aserinsky, was the first to discover rapid eye movement (REM) sleep and demonstrate that it was correlated with dreaming and brain activity. Nathaniel Kleitman was born in Kishinev, Russia, in 1895. He emigrated to the United States in 1915, obtained a PhD from the University of Chicago's Department of Physiology in 1923 (thesis "Studies on the physiology of sleep"), and joined their Faculty in 1925. Two of his students later became well known sleep researchers themselves: the aforementioned Eugene Aserinsky and William Charles Dement.