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March 3, 2025

After over two decades of leadership with the AAN, Janis Miyasaki, MD, MEd, FRCPC, FAAN, is being honored with the Academy’s prestigious President’s Award. The award honors outstanding service to the AAN and to the profession of neurology—two things that Miyasaki has given in spades.

“Selecting Dr. Miyasaki for this award was one of the easiest decisions I’ve made as AAN president,” said Carlayne E. Jackson, MD, FAAN, who has worked alongside Miyasaki in Academy leadership for more than a decade. “She is a wise, creative, and devoted leader of this organization, a trusted colleague, and an excellent neurologist—one who has done so much good both directly, through her practice and teaching, and indirectly, through her tireless work on AAN resources."

Miyasaki has served on nearly every major Academy committee—Brain Health, Meeting Management, ºÃÉ«ÏÈÉú, Practice, and more—and countless subcommittees and work groups, including those on practice improvement, therapeutics and technology, digital strategy, and wellness. She has also been an invaluable voice in important initiatives on the AAN’s value of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion, serving on the Special Committee on Racism, the DEI Presidential Task Force, and the Advancing Women in Academics Subcommittee. 

Most prominently, Miyasaki is a longtime member of the AAN Board of Directors. She was first elected to the Board as a director in 2011 and went on to serve as Treasurer and then Vice President, becoming a trusted leader both in the AAN and in her field. 

“The AAN has helped me grow, make friends and colleagues, and have a career that I could never have dreamed of,” Miyasaki said. “I am so fortunate to have been Vice President and to have had so many opportunities in the AAN, and I’m grateful for the recognition of the President’s Award.”

Miyasaki is Department Head of Clinical Neurosciences at the University of Alberta and Alberta Health Services, where she was the Department of Medicine’s first Director of Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion. She is an active clinical researcher and mentor in movement disorders, physician wellness, and equity. Her other roles have included director of education for neurology for four hospitals; member of the board of trustees for the University Health Network; president of the Medical Staff Association; president of the Canadian Movement Disorders Group; deputy Physician-In-Chief at Toronto Western Hospital, and Associate Clinical Director of the Movement Disorders Centre at Toronto Western Hospital. In 2007, she initiated the first neurologist-led palliative care program for movement disorders in the world. Her accolades for 2025 alone include another AAN honor, the Movement Disorders Research Award, and the King Charles III Coronation Medal.

It was in 2000, however, that Miyasaki first became involved in the AAN’s work. As a specialist in movement disorders, she was invited to write a guideline on Parkinson’s disease. 

“At the time, evidence-based medicine was relatively new,” Miyasaki said. “There was skepticism by the medical profession around it, and there wasn’t a clear methodology around how to develop evidence-based guidelines, which the AAN was trying to do.”

Miyasaki and her colleagues followed a lengthy, rigorous process and examined all of the evidence they could find on drugs used for management of Parkinson’s disease, publishing their work in 2002.

“Our guideline was controversial at the time, because it said something different than what many people expected,” she said. “There was also some controversy around guidelines themselves and whether they imposed practice choices on physicians.”

Newly a faculty member at her alma mater, the University of Toronto, Miyasaki had just completed four years in private practice—and she had some ideas on how guidelines could be better received. Her first change was to provide one-page summaries for doctors and patients, turning dense, academic, and time-consuming reading into ready-to-use insights: “I didn’t always have time in private practice to read journals from cover to cover,” she said.

Her other idea was more complicated, involving many hours of work and outreach on her part: speaking at state neurology society meetings to promote evidence-based medicine.

“I think I’ve been all over Virginia, Kentucky, North Carolina, Texas, and Washington,” she said. “Very lovely states. I was pretty open in my naivete to say, ‘Tell me what you hate about guidelines,’ and believe me, they did tell me. It was a chance to explain that guidelines were not meant to take away physicians’ discretion, but to synthesize hundreds and now thousands of papers into the best evidence to help guide care.”

Miyasaki grew increasingly involved in guideline development at the AAN, becoming a member of the Technology Assessment Subcommittee (a precursor to the Guideline Subcommittee) and then its chair. She watched as guidelines went from a small area of the AAN—one that needed extensive work from the small group of volunteers involved—to one of the top reasons why members choose to belong.

“It was literally hundreds of hours of work to create one guideline, and it was done through the sheer will of the physician volunteers who would guide it along,” Miyasaki recalled of those early days. “To have that kind of commitment to your profession is really special.”

A subcommittee role became a committee role, became an elected Board of Directors role, became more committee roles and leadership positions. As her contributions at the AAN grew, Miyasaki found herself connecting with other members and seeing that—despite their differences in locations and practice settings—they were facing many of the same challenges.

 “When you’re feeling alone in your career, or facing burnout, the connectedness you can find in the AAN is so important,” she said. “When you participate in this community, you find your people—a group of amazing, enthusiastic people who think the brain is the coolest thing ever. You see that other people are facing the same challenges and that we’re going to get through it.” 

After decades of service at the AAN, Miyasaki’s professional life has reached heights that she didn’t previously think possible. More importantly, however, she has found a “home” where her passion for the field is recognized and answered.

She said, “For the hundreds of members who volunteer their time and hard work at the AAN, neurology isn’t just a job—it’s a calling.”