Keen went from being a volunteer, identifying shells at Stanford, and having no formal training in biology or geology, to being one of the world's foremost malacologists.
Shortly after she decided to continue her education when she won a fellowship to Stanford University in 1931, completing her master's degree.
Struggling to find a job, Keen started volunteering at Stanford's Hopkins Marine Station, identifying seashells for the geology department and working under Ida Shepard Oldroyd.
[2] After she graduated and 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.
[citation needed] However, at the same time, some seashells she bought from a curio shop in Berkeley drew her attention and during a trip to Monterey she found more.
[4] While working alongside these researchers, Keen continued to attend geology classes that focused on paleontology and stratigraphy.
Her teaching success was shown through her student's ability to achieve professions of scientists, curators, and malacology department heads.
[5] 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.
[5] 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.
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.
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.
[1] The Guggenheim Fellowship, also known as the "mid career award", is open to numerous citizens in the United States, Canada and a few other countries.
[4] As of 1984, Myra Keen was lucky enough to achieve a citation from the College of Colorado for her personal studies in Natural Sciences, along with her fantastic discoveries within living Mollusks and fossils.
[3] Keen's collection of fossils and mollusks she curated were transferred to the California Academy of Sciences, and her publications can still be found at Stanford University.
After her battle with her failing eyesight and arthritis, Myra Keen died at age 80 in Santa Rosa, California, on January 4, 1986, as a result of cancer.