During 1952 to 1953 she worked as a research assistant at
Harvard University. She became the first woman science instructor at
Cornell University teaching human biology and comparative anatomy from 1955 to 1958. In 1960 she returned to the University of California, Berkeley with the role of lecturer.
UC Berkeley invited Diamond to be an assistant professor in 1965, progressing later to be a full professor, and finally, professor emeritus until her death in 2017. In 1984, Diamond and her associates had access to sufficient tissue from
Albert Einstein's brain to make the first ever analysis of it, followed by publication of their research. The 1985 paper
On the Brain of a Scientist: Albert Einstein created some controversy in academia over the role of
glial cells. However, it also ushered in new interest in neuroglia. Her YouTube Integrative Biology lectures were the second most popular college course in the world in 2010.
Contributions to neuroplasticity Marian Diamond was a pioneer in anatomical neuroscience whose major scientific contributions have changed forever how we view the human brain. Diamond produced the first scientific evidence of anatomical
neuroplasticity in the early 1960s. At that time, the scientific consensus was that the nature of your brain was due to genetics and was unchangeable and fixed. Diamond 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. Her initial anatomical experiment, and replication experiments, with young rats showed that the cerebral cortex of the enriched rats was 6% thicker than the cortex of the impoverished rats based on different kinds of early life experiences. An enriched cortex shows greater learning capacity while an impoverished one shows lesser learning capacity. These paradigm-changing results, published in 1964, helped to launch modern neuroscience. 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. Her research team also 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. == Personal life ==