Adele Dorothy Diamond is a professor of neuroscience at the University of British Columbia, where she is currently a Tier 1 Canada Research Chair in Developmental Cognitive Neuroscience. One of the pioneers in the field of developmental cognitive neuroscience, Diamond researches how executive functions are affected by biological and environmental factors, especially in children. Her discoveries have improved treatment for disorders such as phenylketonuria and attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder, and they have impacted early education.
Early life and education
Diamond's father, Jerome Diamond, was born in 1903 in the Catskills of New York. His was the first Jewish family in Monticello, NY. In the early years they were met with signs everywhere that said, "No Jews and dogs allowed." He attended a one-room schoolhouse and left school to help in the family grocery business. He died as she was entering her senior year in high school. Diamond's mother, Mildred Golden, weighed 2 pounds when she was born in 1916 in New York City. She was placed in a small egg box, put in the oven (to keep her warm), and fed with an eye dropper. She attended Tilden High School in Brooklyn and would have attended college if not for the Great Depression, but instead became the bookkeeper for the family business, Golden Pickle Works. She died in 1997.
Diamond grew up in Brooklyn and Queens and attended public schools (PS 165, Parsons Junior High, and John Bowne High School). She graduated from John Bowne High School as Valedictorian.
She attended Swarthmore College on a four-year Swarthmore National Scholarship and graduated in 1975, majoring in Sociology-Anthropology and Psychology. She was a member of the Varsity Volleyball and Archery teams all four years. She graduated Phi Beta Kappa with the highest honor in the course program of study. While still at Swarthmore, in 1972, she attended the London School of Economics, studying the philosophy of science with Imre Lakatos, an important Popperian philosopher.
Diamond did her PhD graduate work at Harvard University (graduating in 1983), with a four-year NSF Graduate Fellowship for those thought to have outstanding research promise and a three-year Danforth Graduate Fellowship for those committed to university teaching.
Although officially a PhD candidate in Psychology, she spent her first four years of graduate school working primarily in Anthropology (under John and Bea Whiting and Bob LeVine) and Sociology (under Christopher Jencks); this made sense because from 1972 to 1986, the department at Harvard was formally the Department of Psychology and Social Relations, which at least attempted to maintain interdisciplinary relationships between psychologists, sociologists, and anthropologists. At that time, Harvard had an NIMH-funded Pre-doctoral Training Program in Cross-Cultural Psychological Research and the program awarded Diamond three years of funding for her dissertation: one year to prepare to go into the field, one year to go anywhere in the world to do the research (she chose the South Pacific because it seemed the most idyllic), and one year to write up the results. People were very enthusiastic about her thesis topic: "Is the need to be master of your fate intrinsically human or a product of Western culture?" However, she didn't think she was coming up with a good way to study it and that the famous people advising her were not either. They seemed not to be concerned, saying, "Don't worry. You do great work." Not wanting to go and do poor science, Diamond returned the money for Years 2 and 3.
Having given up her initial thesis topic, she returned to a question that Jerome Kagan had posed very excitedly in Diamond's first year in graduate school: "If infants all over the world show the same cognitive changes at roughly the same time, those changes cannot be due entirely to learning or experience, because their experiences are too diverse; there must be a maturational component; what might that maturational component be?" To answer that question, Diamond had to turn to neuroscience. She turned to neuroscience not because of an intrinsic interest in it per se; rather her motivation was to answer a particular question that required a neuroscientific approach.