 After Southard's death in 1920, Canavan became acting director of the laboratories of the Boston Psychopathic Hospital, which would later become the Massachusetts Mental Health Center.From 1920 until her retirement in 1945, she was an associate professor of neuropathology at Boston University and curator of the Warren Anatomical Museum at Harvard Medical School, where she added more than 1,500 specimens and also improved record-keeping and discarded damaged specimens.However, her official title was "assistant curator" because of objections to a woman heading the museum, and she was never appointed to the Harvard faculty.