May is Asian/Pacific American Heritage Month. In honor of our Asian/Pacific colleagues, NAN has joined with the Asian Neuropsychological Association (ANA) to celebrate and highlight the contributions of several pioneers within the health and psychology field. These colleagues have often been overlooked and together we hope to increase awareness of the great contributions made by colleagues in the Asian/Pacific community.

Dr. Hu Hailin was born in Dongyang, Jinhua, Zhejiang province. She received her Bachelor of Science in biochemistry and molecular biology from Peking University (1996), a doctorate at the University of California, Berkley (2002), and a postdoctoral fellowship at the University of Virginia.  In 2008, Dr. Hu returned to China, joined the Chinese Academy of Sciences Institute of Neuroscience in Shanghai, and became the principal investigator of the Hu Lab. She later joined the Medical School of Zhejiang University in Hangzhou in 2015 and became the executive director of the Center for Neuroscience at Zhejiang University School of Medicine. She received the 2022 L’Oréal-UNESCO For Women In Science International Award for her research on the neurobiology of depression. Her findings include identifying the impact of ketamine on the lateral habenula (LHb) that becomes highly active in those suffering from depression, providing a framework for developing new rapid-acting antidepressants. She once noted that she became interested in neuroscience after reading "From Neuron to Brain" by Steve Kuffler and John Nicholls as an undergraduate.

Dr. Juhn Atsushi Wada, MD (1924-2023) was a Professor Emeritus in the Department of Psychiatry and Neurosciences at the University of British Columbia (UBC). Dr. Wada was born in Tokyo in 1924 and earned his M.D. from Hokkaido Imperial University in Sapporo at 22, followed by his Med.Sc.D. at 26. He began his career as an Assistant Professor of Neurology and Psychiatry in 1951 and left post-war Japan to join the University of Minnesota in 1954 before moving on to the Montreal Neurological Institute (MNI) in 1955. He joined UBC's Medical Faculty in 1956 and remained there until his retirement in 1994. Dr. Wada was a Co-founder of the Canadian League Against Epilepsy (CLAE) and served as the CLAE President from 1977 to 1979. Dr. Wada's groundbreaking work as a clinician-researcher at Hokkaido University led him to develop a technique for determining hemisphere dominance for speech by injecting barbiturate into the carotid artery, anesthetizing one hemisphere of the brain. This procedure, later known as the Wada test, was further refined to assess memory during his tenure at the MNI and became the gold standard for evaluating hemisphere dominance for language and memory.