# Adele Diamond

Adele Dorothy Diamond FRSC 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 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 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.
Diamond did her PhD graduate work at Harvard University (graduating in 1983), with a four-year NSF Graduate Fellowship and a three-year Danforth Graduate Fellowship.
Although officially a PhD candidate in Psychology, she spent her first four years of graduate school working primarily in anthropology and sociology. at the time the department was formally the Department of Psychology and Social Relations, which 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), and one year to write up the results. Her thesis topic was "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 abandoned the topic and 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 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 turned to neuroscience.
Diamond hypothesized that maturational changes in the brain's prefrontal cortex made possible the impressive cognitive advances seen between 6 and 12 months of age. At that time no one was studying the prefrontal cortex or any topic in cognitive neuroscience in the Harvard Psychology Department. Diamond learned from books on her own and was granted permission to add Nelson Butters from the Boston VA (who had published widely on the anatomy and functions of prefrontal cortex) to her thesis committee.
To get hard evidence on the brain to support her hypothesis, Diamond went to Yale University School of Medicine to work with Patricia Goldman-Rakic. That work was supported by Sloan and NIMH Postdoctoral Fellowship Awards.

## Research

Diamond organized a conference, “The Development and Neural Basis of Higher Cognitive Functions,” that brought together developmental psychologists, neuroscientists, and cognitive scientists who were using the same behavioral paradigms but were unaware of that fact. The conference and resulting book served to jumpstart many research collaborations and the nascent field of developmental cognitive neuroscience.
Diamond's team discovered a long-lasting visual deficit if children with phenylketonuria are not started on a low-phenylalanine diet within days of birth (the norm had been to start them within two weeks of birth).
Her 2005 paper on the fundamental neurobiological and clinical differences between the inattentive-type ADHD and those ADHD types in which hyperactivity is present was titled "BADD (ADHD without hyperactivity), a neurobiologically and behaviorally distinct disorder from ADHD (with hyperactivity)".
Much of Diamond's work has started with the premise that even though a child may appear incapable of doing or understanding something, if the question is posed differently or the concept taught in new ways, the child can succeed. Diamond illustrated this approach first with infants' understanding of the concept of contiguity, then with their ability to grasp abstract concepts, and next with children's ability to succeed on a Stroop-like task requiring memory and inhibition.

## Selected awards and honors

In 2009, Diamond was elected as a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada, and she received a YWCA Woman of Distinction Award (recognized nationally as an important award for women).
In 2014, Diamond received the Urie Bronfenbrenner Award for Lifetime Contributions to Developmental Psychology in the Service of Science and Society from the American Psychological Association, and she was recognized as one of the 15 most influential neuroscientists alive today.
In 2015, Ben-Gurion University of the Negev conferred an honorary doctorate (Doctor of Philosophy honoris causa) on Diamond.
In 2019, Diamond's impact ranked in top 0.01% of scientists.
In 2024, she received an Honorary Doctor of Science Degree honoris causa from the University of Cambridge in the UK.
She has held a Tier 1 Canada Research Chair for more than ten years.

## Teacher and speaker

Diamond's courses have received numerous positive reviews throughout her career. She has almost 600 invited addresses, including hundreds of keynote addresses and over 30 named lectures. She has spoken in North America and abroad (including in Argentina, Australia, Austria, Belgium, Brazil, Bulgaria, Chile, Czechoslovakia, Denmark, Ecuador, France, Germany, India, Indonesia [Bali & Java], Ireland, Israel, Italy, Mexico, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Peru, Poland, Portugal, Russia, South Africa, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, Thailand, and the UK [England, Scotland, and Wales]).

## Selected publications

Diamond has authored or co-authored about a hundred papers on her research work. Below are selected publications: