Diane Nelson
Advisory Board Member
Dr. Diane Nelson is a National Research Council Postdoctoral Fellow working in the Material Measurement Laboratory at the National Institute of Standards and Technology. Dr. Nelson has spent her career designing respiratory drug delivery systems with increased bioavailability that cater to specific therapeutic windows and disease states. Her expertise in respiratory drug delivery includes drug formulation, mass transport, pharmacokinetics, respiratory infection models, and liquid ventilation; and her current research explores the role of extracellular vesicles in pulmonary fibrosis.
An award-winning scholar, Dr. Nelson is the recipient of the Presidential Postdoctoral Fellowship at Carnegie Mellon University and the Burroughs Welcome Fund Postdoctoral Fellowship. In 2018, STAT Wunderkinds celebrated Dr. Nelson as “the next generation of scientific superstars” and her innovative research has been featured on NPR Pittsburgh and Medgadget. Furthermore, she has advised medical device companies on market opportunities of liquid ventilation during the COVID-19 pandemic and partnered with vape manufactures to explore the causes of vaping-associated pulmonary injury during the height of the outbreak in 2019.
Dr. Nelson is a longstanding advocate of STEM education. She serves on the advisory boards of Roxbury Community College Mathematics Department and AICHE Henry T. Brown Endowment Fund. She has also been interviewed by Nature on running effective programs to improve diversity in STEM.
Dr. Nelson holds a PhD in Biomedical Engineering and MS in Chemical Engineering from Carnegie Mellon University, a BS in Biomedical Engineering from Columbia University, and a BA in Mathematics from Georgetown University.