Huda Akil

Huda Akil (; born 1945) is a Syrian-American neuroscientist whose research has contributed to the understanding of the neurobiology of emotions, including pain, anxiety, depression, and substance abuse. Akil and her 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. Akil is also one of seven leading scientists that comprise the Hope For Depression Research Task Force, whom developed a research plan that combines the currently most advanced knowledge in genetics, epigenetics, molecular biology, electrophysiology, and brain imaging in an effort to accelerate cutting-edge scientific research pertaining to depression and its related mood and emotional disorders. 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 As, especially difficult, since she was not fluent in English. She fulfilled the requirement and graduated in 1967 summa cum laude with a Bachelor of Arts in Psychology. Akil initially took interest in the psychology of language, originally sparked by her father, who was a psychologist.

Career and research Akil's research covers many areas, but is collectively rooted in understanding emotions. Throughout her career her research has included work on opiate receptors, structure function analyses, behavioral studies, the neurobiology of severe psychiatric disorder, post mortem brains, and molecular genetic research. Akil says, "It has always been about trying to understand the circuits of emotions. I have always been interested in how the process of responding to the world changes the brain and how, in turn, the brain changes an animals environment and perceptions of the world. I love all of it." This idea of SPA became the topic of Akil's Ph.D. dissertation. 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.

Akil continued research in the area of opioid peptides and their receptors at the University of Michigan Mental Health Research Institute where she was employed as a basic scientist. Over the years the two laboratories have conducted extensive research in a variety of molecular and neural mechanisms associated with stress reactivity and their relation to anxiety and depression, focusing on the link of opioids and their receptors in stress induced analgesia as well as the role of steroid stress hormone receptors in emotionality. Furthermore, Akil and Watson were the first to demonstrate that there is an abnormal, decreased sensitivity to glucocorticoid fast feedback that occurs at the level of the brain, rather than the pituitary in depressed patients.

Currently, the Akil Laboratory is working to develop animal models in order to understand the genetic and developmental basis of differences in temperament and the implications of these inborn differences for vulnerability to anxiety, depression and substance abuse.

Honors and awards Member: US National Academy of Sciences US National Academy of Medicine American Academy of Arts and Sciences 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 Stanley Watson, of the Robert J. and Claire Pasarow Foundation Medical Research Award for Neuropsychiatry. In 1998, 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 Akil has continued to receive awards for her 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 Watson, and the AAMC 2013 Award for Distinguished Research in the Biomedical Sciences. In 2023 she was awarded the Gruber Prize in Neuroscience and the National Medal of Science.

Akil is a member of 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. The couple has two children, Brendon (also a neuroscientist at the University of Michigan) and Kathleen. Akil describes her approach to parenting her children as going at it "full throttle", keeping her career on track and raising her children simultaneously.