Huda Akil

In addition, Dr. Akil has been honored with membership to several societies, including the Institute of Medicine of the National Academy of Sciences, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Furthermore, she has served as the President of the American College of Neuropsychopharmacology (1998) and President of the Society for Neuroscience (2004), which is the largest neuroscience organization in the world. In addition, Dr. Akil is currently the co-chair for the Neuroscience Steering Committee at the Foundation for the National Institute of Health and serves on the Council of the Institute of Medicine of the US National Academy of Sciences. A full list of awards, honors, memberships to distinguished societies, and election to various boards can be found in her Curriculum Vitae.

Akil is a decorated scientist, who has been the recipient of numerous awards throughout her career. In 1993, she received the National Institute on Drug Abuse Pacesetter Award. The following year she was the co-recipient, with Dr. Stanley Watson, of the Robert J. and Claire Pasarow Foundation Medical Research Award for Neuropsychiatry. In 1998, Dr. Akil was honored with the Sachar Award from Columbia University and the Bristol Myers Squibb Unrestricted Research Funds Award. She accepted the John P. McGovern Award in Behavioral Sciences from the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2006 and in 2007 was the recipient of the Society for Neuroscience Mika Salpeter Lifetime Achievement Award and the Patricia Goldman-Rakic Prize for Cognitive Neuroscience. Within the past five years Dr. Akil has continued to receive awards for her outstanding research, which include, the Paul Hoch Distinguished Research Service Award from the American College of Neuropsychopharmacology in 2010, the 2012 Sarnat Prize from the Institute of Medicine with Dr. Watson, and the AAMC 2013 Award for Distinguished Research in the Biomedical Sciences.

In 1970 Akil joined John Liebeskind, an assistant professor at UCLA who was interested in the neurobiology of pain, and more specifically focused on the neural circuitry of phantom pain, and the idea that phantom pain was not a purely physical phenomenon, but had a psychological role as well. Another member of the lab observed that electrical stimulation reduced, rather than enhanced pain experience, which inspired Akil and fellow graduate student, David Mayer, to continue to research this phenomenon, which they later referred to as “stimulation produced analgesia" (SPA). Working on rats, they found that stimulation at several mesencephalic and diencephalic sites eradicated responsiveness to painful stimuli and left other sensory modes relatively unaffected. This idea of SPA became the topic of Akil's Ph.D. dissertation. Further research in this area was conducted in the rat by employing the D'Amour and Smith tail flick test in order to investigate role played by the cerebral monoamines, dopamine, noradrenaline, and serotonin. Akil and colleagues used four different approaches to alter transmission in monoamine pathways: depletion of monoamine stores, replacement of depleted monoamine stores, potentiation of monamine systems, and blockade of catecholamine receptors; the four approaches produced internally consistent results. In 1977, they discovered that the narcotic antagonist naloxone partially reverses analgesia produced by focal electrical stimulation of the brain. In this study analgesia was produced in the periaqueductal gray matter, which is an area of the brain that is known to contain a large number of opiate binding sites. This study along with results from other studies conducted at the time suggested that there is a natural neural system in the brain, which uses a morphine-like substance to produce analgesia, however it was not known if the activation of this system was brought about pharmacologically by direct receptor stimulation or electrically by release of the endogenous substance.

She was inspired to pursue a life of science after reading a book on Marie Curie, the great physicist and Nobel Prize winner, that was given to her by one of the French nuns at the library. She refers to this instance as a "turning point" in her life where she realized that a woman who grew up far away from the centers of knowledge, Great Britain, France, and the United States, could become a great scientist, like Curie. She pursued her undergraduate degree at the American University of Beirut in Lebanon. She entered university as a sophomore, on a scholarship from the Rockefeller Foundation that required her to earn straight A's, which was especially difficult, since she was not fluent in English, however she fulfilled this requirement and graduated in 1967 summa cum laude with a Bachelor of Arts in Psychology. Akil initially took interest in the psychology of language, an interest that was sparked by her father, who was a psychologist.

Huda Akil (born 1945) is a Syrian–American neuroscientist whose pioneering research has contributed to the understanding of the neurobiology of emotions, including pain, anxiety, depression, and substance abuse. Akil and colleagues are best known for providing the first physiological evidence for a role of endorphins in the brain and demonstrating that endorphins are activated by stress and can cause pain inhibition.