Ivan Fred Diamond MD, PhD

Ivan Diamond, MD, Ph.D. was born and raised in Brooklyn, NY. In 1951 at 16 years of age he took a special Ford Foundation examination which enabled him to attend the University of Chicago (U of C) after his sophomore year at Abraham Lincoln High School. He credits his education at U of C with teaching me how to think. After attending the U of C School of Medicine (1957 – 1961), and a medical internship at the New England Center Hospital (Tufts University), He completed a Neurology residency with Richard Richter at U of C (1962 - 65).

As a resident in Neurology and as a postdoctoral fellow at U of C (1964 – 1967), I had the opportunity to train with Rudi Schmid, who was an awe-inspiring role model in academic medicine and a superb medical scientist. Rudi kindled my devotion to translational medicine. He elucidated the pathogenic mechanism by which unconjugated, unbound bilirubin crosses the blood-brain barrier to cause bilirubin encephalopathy (kernicterus) in jaundiced babies, particularly in premature infants. This body of work became his Ph.D. thesis with Ruth Rhines at U of C (1967). As the pathogenesis of bilirubin encephalopathy became clear to physicians, the use of albumin infusions and phototherapy to prevent this condition became widespread in newborn nurseries.

Ivan Diamond was recruited to the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF) in 1969 by Robert Fishman and Melvin Grumbach with a joint appointment in Neurology and Pediatrics. Each had set out to build the best departments in the country, and they succeeded by all accounts. He was lucky to be surrounded by exciting faculty in medicine and science at UCSF and was able to extend work on phototherapy for bilirubin encephalopathy to develop an entirely novel photodynamic therapy for malignant tumors.