Diana is an Associate Research Scientist with the IIHG Bioinformatics Division. Her areas of expertise are clinical sequence analysis and pipeline development.  Diana received both a B.S. in Biochemistry & Molecular Biology and a B.S in Computer Engineering from Penn State University in 2003. While there, she worked with Dr. Webb Miller and Dr. Ross Harrison on early statistical models of regulatory sequence based on multiple genome alignment. From there, she pursued a Ph.D. in Computational Biology at Washington University in St. Louis, studying with Dr. Sean Eddy. Both in St. Louis and later at the HHMI Janelia Farm campus, Diana worked on algorithm design and implementation for the profile stochastic context-free grammars (SCFGs) used to model non-coding RNAs and their secondary structures. She wrote high-performance code for match detection and alignment using high-parallel vector processing. After earning her Ph.D. in 2010, Diana spent two years as a postdoctoral researcher at the National Human Genome Research Institute with Dr. Laura Elnitski. There she started working with clinical data, looking at methylation micro-arrays of uterine and ovarian cancers.

Diana joined the University of Iowa and the newly formed Bioinformatics Division in 2012. She has worked on a variety of project types, including expression analysis by either micro-array or RNA-seq, but has primarily concentrated on mutational analysis of human clinical sequencing. Projects have included familial exome analysis for rare diseases, patient sequencing for kidney diseases and hearing loss—each of which is genetically heterogeneous—and predictive analysis of drug metabolism to customize drug prescription and dosage. Through this work, she also has experience in clinical pipeline reporting and documentation for regulatory compliance.

Diana also maintains an appointment with the Molecular Otolaryngology and Renal Research Laboratory (MORL).