After she received her Ph.D., Keen was unable to find a job within the field of psychology due to the major impact of
The Great Depression, leaving her unemployed. However, at the same time, some seashells she bought from a curio shop in Berkeley drew her attention and she found more during a trip to Monterey. After learning that Ida Oldroyd's work at Stanford involved shells, Keen volunteered herself to be an assistant of Oldroyd. During this time, she became an informal student of a Stanford paleontologist, Hubert Schenk. According to her own description, it was this tutorship that provided her the academic guidance in paleontology she needed. Concurrently, Keen audited Schenk's geology classes that focused on
paleontology and
stratigraphy and collaborated on research. After four years of volunteering, Stanford hired her as the curator of paleontology. Over the course of 23 years of teaching, during which she was one of only three female science professors, she taught courses on paleontology, curatorial methods, and
biological oceanography, among other subjects. In 1954 Keen became assistant professor of paleontology, followed by curator of malacology in 1957. In 1964 she was awarded a
Guggenheim Fellowship. Keen retired in 1970 as professor of paleontology emeritus and curator of malacology emeritus. She was a member of
Phi Beta Kappa and a fellow at the
Geological Society of America and the
Paleontological Society. In 1979, she was the first woman to be given the Fellow Medal from the
California Academy of Sciences. She served as chair of the Committee on Nomenclature of the Society of Systematic Zoology. She was also president of the Western Society of Malacologists and the American Malacological Union. Myra Keen was active in publishing. She wrote nine books. A few of her most noted published books are,
Abridged Check List and Bibliography of West North American Mollusca (1937),
Check List of California Tertiary Marine Mollusca (1944) which she co-wrote with Herdis Bentson,
Sea Shells of Tropical West America (1958), and a second edition (1971) with the assistance James H. McLean,
Marine Molluscan Genera of Western North America:
An Illustrated Key (1963), and a second edition (1974), coauthored with Eugene Coan. In addition, Keen wrote over seventy-five papers that were published in scholarly journals. One of the first articles she wrote was focused on her documentation of how molluscan faunas reacted to changes at different latitudes due to the gradual cooling of the sea. The study that she published on this subject was valuable to geologists for two main reasons. It helped geologists understand the temperature change of the sea in past times, as well as identifying source areas of sedimentary rocks that had moved to new positions due to
continental drift. Her research work focused around
mollusk systematics, as well as marine molluscan
Cenozoic paleontology,
neontology and
zoogeography of the western North America and marine mollusk fauna from the
Panamic Province. She helped catalog, organize and collect for the Cenozoic mollusk collection at Stanford. Keen provided the first research documentation regarding how the distribution of mollusks on the Pacific coast is affected by temperature. In 1960, in the eastern
Pacific Ocean, she discovered the first living examples of
bivalved gastropods, which were in the species and subspecies
Berthelinia chloris belvederica. Prior to this discovery, bivalved gastropods had been identified as bivalves, based on the shell characteristics. In 1975, Keen was invited to meet with
Emperor Hirohito of Japan. He was a collector of shells, and had sent Keen specimens. The two also exchanged papers. When he visited in 1975 the two met in
San Francisco, where they discussed their shared interest of shells and invertebrates. == Awards and achievements ==