16 AAPI Nurses To Know For Asian Pacific American Heritage Month

Asian Pacific American Heritage Month in May recognizes a community that stood on the front lines during COVID-19 while also facing a wave of anti-Asian sentiment spawned by the pandemic.

The AAPI community is well represented in healthcare. Roughly 8.5% of healthcare workers are AAPI, compared to 6.8% of the overall population. Minority contributions to nursing have long gone under-recorded, and a full picture of the profession requires acknowledging them. The 16 nurses below shaped nursing through research, education, and patient care, past and present.

1. Janejira Justine Chaiyasit

An assistant professor of nursing at Columbia University and a certified adult-gerontology nurse practitioner, Chaiyasit earned her bachelor's, MSN, and doctorate from Columbia University School of Nursing. Alongside teaching, she maintains a clinical practice focused on disease prevention and management, health promotion, and episodic care. Her research covers anxiety, depression, family planning, and women's health, and she uses her role to advocate for the Asian population and correct misinformation.

2. An Dinh

Dinh works on the palliative care team at the VA Long Beach Healthcare System and has earned a DAISY Award for the care and compassion she shows patients and their families. She graduated from the University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston.

3. Kay Fukuda

Fukuda was a naval cadet nurse interned at Manzanar War Relocation Center in Eastern California during World War II, one of 10 camps where the U.S. incarcerated 110,000 Japanese Americans after the bombing of Pearl Harbor. Manzanar is now a national historic site documenting that injustice. Little is known about Fukuda beyond Ansel Adams photographing her in 1943, when he visited the camps to portray Japanese Americans as hard-working citizens who deserved respect.

4. Anastacia Giron-Tupas

Born in Laoag, Ilocos Norte on August 24, 1890, Giron-Tupas dedicated her career to advancing nursing in the Philippines and worldwide. Known as the "Dean of Philippine Nursing," she developed the first bachelor of science in nursing curriculum and helped build the University of the Philippines into a premier nursing school. She recorded the changes she led in her book, "History of Nursing in the Philippines." She died in 1972 at age 82.

5. Li Hong

Hong earned her MSN in nursing informatics from the University of Texas at Arlington and received the Florence Nightingale Medal in 2019, the only Chinese recipient among 29 nurses honored worldwide that year for exemplary service or innovation in public health or nursing education. A fellow of the American Academy of Nursing with training in disaster relief and public health nursing, she manages clinical research at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center.

6. Aiko Hamaguchi

Hamaguchi was a second nurse Ansel Adams photographed at Manzanar in 1943. Almost nothing else about her survives in the record. Under President Franklin Roosevelt's 1942 executive order, the secretary of war was authorized to relocate and detain Japanese Americans, 60% of them U.S. citizens, while no comparable effort targeted Germans or Italians. Families had days to dispose of their property before moving to camps with deplorable conditions, and detained healthcare workers were pressed into caring for the interned. By the time internment ended in December 1944, 1,800 people had died and an estimated $400 million in property was lost, roughly $6.6 billion in 2022 dollars.

7. Eun-Ok Im

Im has held faculty positions at the University of Pennsylvania, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, and University of Texas at Austin before joining Emory University in 2019, where she serves as senior associate dean for research and innovation at the Nell Hodgson Woodruff School of Nursing. She holds master's degrees in public health and nursing and a Ph.D. in nursing from UCSF. In January 2020 she became president of the AAPI Nurses Association. A recognized theorist in cross-cultural women's health, she has published over 370 papers and presented at more than 320 conferences.

8. Rose Lim Luey

A child of Chinese immigrants, Luey graduated from the Samuel Merritt Hospital School of Nursing in 1951 as one of its first Chinese American students. She raised three children, was named Oakland's 1972 Mother of the Year, then returned to public health nursing, using her bilingual skills to care for Chinese Americans and help Vietnamese immigrants resettle. A founding member of Asian Health Services, she volunteered with the American Red Cross for 20 years. In 2017, at 87, she was the first subject in an oral history series from Samuel Merritt University's Office of Diversity and Inclusion.

9. Carol Manilay-Robles

Manilay-Robles received the DAISY Award in 2013, nominated by the ABP Family Council for her work and leadership at the ABP Health Center. She sits on the executive board of the Philippine Nurses Association of Metro DC, where she has held several positions, including treasurer.

10. Maginia Sajise Morales

Morales arrived in the U.S. from the Philippines in 1977 after nursing school, enlisted in the Army in 1985, and was commissioned as a first lieutenant. After four years in a reserve unit she moved to active duty in 1989, starting on a burn unit in San Antonio while earning her MSN. She deployed in 1994 with the 95th Combat Support Hospital and later the 212th Mobile Army Surgical Hospital, serving as chief of critical care in Bosnia. She led the intensive care department at Madigan Army Medical Center and reached the rank of major. Deployed to Iraq in January 2004, she returned the next month due to illness and retired in November 2004. The Army honored her as a "Veteran of the Day" in March 2019.

11. Mary Frances Oneha

Oneha has served Native Hawaiian communities for over 20 years. She earned her MSN from the University of Washington and became the first Native Hawaiian to earn a Ph.D., with community-based research on Native Hawaiian health. She joined Waimanalo Health Center as chief executive officer in 2012, integrating Native Hawaiian culture throughout the organization. In 2013 she was recognized as a White House AAPI Woman Champion of Change and named an American Academy of Nursing fellow.

12. Donna-Marie Palakiko

Palakiko, Ph.D., APRN, is a Native Hawaiian nurse and the first hired into a tenure track at the University of Hawaii at Manoa's School of Nursing and Dental Hygiene. She received a 2022 Fulbright Postdoctoral Scholarship and a $60,000 grant from the Hawaii Community Foundation's Robert C. Perry Fund. She spent more than 20 years as a community health nurse, administrator, and researcher developing lifestyle interventions for Hawaiian and Pacific Island people before joining the faculty in 2019.

13. Vivian Sanderlin

Sanderlin chairs the Philippine Nurses Association of San Diego and led its COVID-19 Vaccination Task Force, one of many Filipino leaders who spoke out during the pandemic. She served as the association's 42nd president from 2016 to 2018, working to raise student nurse standards and focus on community service.

14. Julita Villaruel Sotejo

Born in 1906, Sotejo developed the model of nursing education used in the Philippines. She graduated nursing school as valedictorian in 1929 and was principal of the Philippine General Hospital School of Nursing until 1941, when she took a scholarship to Yale University School of Nursing. She earned a master's in nursing administration from the University of Chicago and a law doctorate at age 85. She died in 2003 at age 97.

15. Zenei Triunfo-Cortez

Triunfo-Cortez is a registered nurse serving as one of three presidents of National Nurses United and the California Nurses Association/National Nurses Organizing Committee. Founded in 2009, NNU has more than 175,000 members and is the largest nurses union and professional association in U.S. history. She has worked to inspire Filipino nurses through a pandemic that brought racist challenges, and she has been an outspoken advocate for healthcare system reform. The AFL-CIO honored her in 2019 during Asian Pacific American Heritage Month.

16. Yu (Philip) Xu

Xu was born in 1961 in Zheng Zhou, China, and arrived in the U.S. in 1991 to complete his Ph.D. in education at the State University of New York at Buffalo. He later earned an associate degree in nursing in Alabama and an MSN in community and public health nursing from the University of South Alabama. From 1999 until his death from cancer at age 52 in 2013, he published 56 research reports and peer-reviewed articles on the integration of international nurses into the U.S. healthcare system, and he directed the Ph.D. program in nursing at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. He served as president of the AAPI Nurses Association from 2012 until his death.