Lyman Wynne was Professor Emeritus of Psychiatry at the University of Rochester where he was Departmental Chair from 1971-75. He spent the prior 20 years at the National Institute of Mental Health, where he became head of Intramural Research and pioneered family therapy. With his wife Adele, he was the co-founder of the Wynne Center for Family Research in Rochester, New York. He served as President of the Board of Family Process.

Conceptualizing families as the unit of treatment as early as 1947, Dr. Wynne's studies of communication deviance in the families of schizophrenia were first published in a series of articles with his colleague, Margaret T. Singer, in the Archives of General Psychiatry in 1963-65. He co-edited The Nature of Schizophrenia with R. L. Cromwell and S. Matthysse (Wiley, 1978). For the past 30 years, Dr Wynne studied the interaction of genes and environment in the development of schizophrenia in a longitudinal study in Finland. Dr. Wynne made major theoretical contributions to our understanding of systems consultation, intimacy, and relationship formation.

A Charter Member, Dr. Wynne also served AFTA as a Board member and as Chair of the Awards and Liaison Committees. He received AFTA' s Award for Distinguished Achievement in Family Therapy Research in 1981 and for Distinguished Contribution to Family Therapy Theory and Practice in 1989.