Akira Arimura (有村 章, Arimura Akira, December 26, 1923 – December 10, 2007) was a Japanese-American professor of medicine at Tulane University, and the founding Director of the university's Hébert Research Center, working on neuroendocrinology and biochemistry research.
[2] Under Professor Shinji Ito, Arimura began his groundbreaking endocrinology dissertation on posterior pituitary hormones, ultimately getting published in Nature (Itoh and Arimura 1954) and attracting global attention.
After moving to the United States, he became a Professor in the Department of Medicine in 1970 at Tulane University, and established his own laboratory in 1982.
To further scientific relations between the US and Japan, Arimura formed a co-op between the two countries, called the US-Japan Cooperative Biomedical Research Laboratories at Tulane, continuing his research on PACAP and standing as the director of the program to his death.
Arimura returned to Japan to assist his old professor Ito at the Hokkaido University School of Medicine in 1961, and then moved back to the US to work with Dr. Schally, successfully beating the Schally lab's research competitor, Dr. Roger Guillemin's lab, in the race to purify and characterize the luteinizing-hormone releasing hormone.