Overview
Hi, I’m Diana! I use any pronouns (they/he/she, ranked in order of preference). I’m a fourth-year grad student and Ph.D. candidate studying astronomy at Cornell. My thesis uses stellar kinematics (how stars move) to inform the search for life, particularly in the form of technosignatures (aka SETI, the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence). Advising me on the theory and stellar kinematics is Dr. Lisa Kaltenegger here at the Carl Sagan Institute (CSI), with great help from Dr. Jackie Faherty at the American Museum of Natural History in NYC. As for my ongoing radio SETI observations, I am supervised by Dr. Jake Turner at CSI. Shout-out to the NSF-GRFP for funding me these past few years!
My heart lies in the immigrant communities of Queens, NYC, where I grew up, and my grandpa’s rural mountain village in Oaxaca, Mexico, where adulthood takes me time and again. I received my B.S. in Physics with an Astrophysics Concentration and a Sociology Minor from Drexel University in 2021, where I created star formation simulations with Dr. Stephen McMillan, and probed the limits of computational linguistics with Dr. Jake Ryland Williams. Afterwards, I worked with Dr. David Kipping at Columbia University to infer the minimum orbital eccentricities of M-dwarf planets detected by TESS (Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite).
In my free time, you can find me writing–I’ve written Astrobites, bilingual zines, and even a sci-fi short story that won second place at AbSciCon 2026. When I’m not writing, I’m thinking up funny one-liners for my next talk at Astronomy on Tap Ithaca, which I help organize; or I'm practicing Muay Thai or playing Dungeons & Dragons or playing video games or…
Research Focus
Advisor: Professor Lisa Kaltenegger