Lewis P. Rowland, neurologist and former chairman of the neurology department at University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine, died on March 16 at age 91.

Dr. Rowland was born Lewis Phillip Rosenthal in Brooklyn, New York. His father, Henry Rosenthal, changed the family surname when Lewis was a teenager because Ivy League colleges had quotas for Jews and he did not want his sons to be turned down due to their last name, according to the New York Times.

In 1943, Dr. Rowland joined the US Navy. He then attended Yale University for undergraduate studies and medical school, earning his MD in 1948.

He met his wife, Esther, in 1952 at a fundraising party for national health insurance. They married three months later and moved to Bethesda, Maryland, in 1953, where Dr. Rowland took a position at the NIH. During the McCarthy era, FBI agents sought to question him about his involvement with the Association of Interns and Medical Students due to suspected Communist leanings. Because Dr. Rowland refused to be interrogated, he was fired from the NIH.

He worked for Montefiore Medical Center in the Bronx and Columbia University before joining Penn in 1967. Early on, he became known for his work on the biochemical bases of inherited neurological disorders.

He was hired as professor of neurology and chairman of Penn’s neurology department (Almanac January 1968). He also became director of the neurology department’s Biomedical Center for Clinical Neurological Disorders and chairman of the faculty committee to organize a new interdepartmental course in neurobiology at the medical school.

In 1973, Dr. Rowland returned to Columbia University, where he was chairman of neurology until his retirement in 1993.

He focused his research and patient care on ALS and was founder and director of the Eleanor and Lou Gehrig MDA/ALS Center until 1999 and founder and co-director of the H. Houston Merritt Clinical Research Center for Muscular Dystrophy and Related Diseases at Columbia.

Dr. Rowland was president of the American Neurological Association from 1980-1981 and the American Academy of Neurology from 1989-1991. He was editor-in-chief of the journal Neurology from 1977-1987 and editor of Merritt’s Textbook of Neurology, Current Neurologic Drugs, and Clinical Cases in Neurology. More recently, he had served as president of the Parkinson’s Disease Foundation and a member of the Institute of Medicine (now the National Academy of Medicine).

He is survived by his wife, Esther; brother, Theodore; children, Steven, Joy Rosenthal and Andrew; five grandchildren; and two great-grandchildren.