Marian Cleeves Diamond, Doctor of Philosophy is a professor of anatomy at the University of California, Berkeley who has published research into the neuroanatomy of the forebrain, notably the discovery of the impact of the environment on brain development, the differences between the cerebral cortex of male and female rats, and the likely link between positive thinking and immune health.
Background
Marian Cleeves Diamond was born in Glendale, California to Doctor Montague Cleeves and Rosa Marian Wamphler Cleeves as the sixth and last child in the family. Her father was an English physician and her Mother a Latin teacher at Berkeley High School. Diamond grew up in Louisiana Crescenta.
Education
She was educated with her siblings near home at Louisiana Crescenta grammar school, Clark Junior High, Glendale High School and finally Glendale Community College, before going to University of California, Berkeley. During her Doctor of Philosophy degree Marian Diamond also began to teach, and teaching became a lifelong passion that has continued well into her eighties.
Career
She played tennis at Berkeley, earning a letter. After graduating with a bachelor"s degree in 1948, Diamond spent a summer at the University of Oslo, Norway before returning to Berkeley for her graduate studies, the first female graduate student in the department of anatomy. Her doctoral dissertation thesis "Functional Interrelationships of the Hypothalamus and the Neurohypophysis" was published in 1953.
Marian Diamond received her Doctor of Philosophy degree in human anatomy.
Personal life
Diamond married Richard Martin Diamond in 1950 and they had four children, Catherine Theresa (1953), Richard Cleeves (1955) Jeff Barja (1958) and Ann (1962). Documentary film and web series
My Love Affair with the Brain: The Life and Science of Doctor Marian Diamond is a multipart web series about Doctor Diamond"s life as a pioneering woman of science, her curiosity and passion for the human brain, as well as her research and love of teaching.
Marian Diamond has made a number of major scientific contributions to anatomical neuroscience. She showed that the structural components of the cerebral cortex can be altered by either enriched or impoverished environments at any age, from prenatal to extremely old age.
An enriched cortex shows greater learning capacity, an impoverished, lesser learning capacity.
Diamond demonstrated that the structural arrangement of the male and female cortices is significantly different and can be altered in the absence of sex steroid hormones. Diamond showed that the dorsal lateral frontal cerebral cortex is bilaterally deficient in the immune deficient mouse and can be reversed with thymic transplants. In humans, cognitive stimulation increases circulating CD4-positive T lymphocytes, supporting the idea that immunity can be voluntarily modulated, in other words, that positive thinking can impact the immune system.
A selected set of Marian Diamond"s published books and papers can be found here.