She previously served as co-director of the Molecular and Behavioral Neuroscience institute and the University of Michigan node of the Pritzker Neuropsychiatric Disorders Research Consortium with her husband, Stanley Watson.

[2][5] 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.

At the University of Iowa she took a course on the basics of neuroscience and pharmacology and was intrigued, which led her to complete a rotation in the electrophysiology lab where she did research on learning with Steve Fox.

At UCLA she worked with John Liebeskind on pain research and after completing her Ph.D. she joined the laboratory of Jack Barchas at Stanford University.

[6] 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.

[5][6] 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.

[11] 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.

[11] A combination of behavioral, pharmacological, and biochemical research led Akil and colleagues of the Barchas Laboratory at Stanford to the endorphins, specifically two peptides called enkephalins.

Building on prior research, Akil and colleagues established that in the rat, inescapable acute stress causes a significant increase in the opioid peptides, enkephalins and endorphins with a concurrent reduction in pain responsiveness.

[1][3][14] 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.

They co-direct the University of Michigan Medical School's Molecular and Behavioral Neuroscience Institute and each has played an integral role in the other's career.