Diane graduated from the University of Washington in 1982 by completing her Postdoctoral Fellow in Nursing. She has an extensive background: Educational Psychology, Child Counseling, Development and School Psychology, and Maternal-Child Nursing.

Her interests include: (1) Children and adolescents with special health care needs as defined by environmental, psychosocial, and/or biological risk/comorbidity factors. (2) Community based prevention and intervention programs and collaborative therapeutic approaches for children/ adolescents and their families. (3) Diversity as expressed through culture, race, ethnicity, SES, and gender. (4) Clinical Outcome studies, research design and various methodologies to examine differential treatment effects, individual differences and cost effectiveness. (5) Child/adolescent development with particular emphasis on the sense of self in relation to gender issues.

She is currently the Project Director who was one of 2 authors who conceptualized and wrote the competitive renewal of MCHB/ HRSA funded Nursing Training Grant, June 1998 to June 2003). "Nursing Leadership Enhancement for Culturally Competent Care: Children and Adolescents with Special Health Care Needs, Families and Communities." She continues to development an ongoing implementation of a research evaluation design that generated an extensive 6 year follow-up data base on 26 master's and 6 doctoral graduates documenting their leadership contributions toward nursing and health care. Evaluation Protocol was noted by MCHB as an exemplar for other MCHB training grants. Graduate students are influencing health care in a variety of ways such as the development/ evaluation of new nursing positions within health care systems, development of creative community based programs, elected leadership positions on Advisory Boards, Professional Organizations, etc., dissemination of knowledge through publications, presentations, etc. and the involvement in clinical research projects due to these projects.