Diana Bianchi

Diana W. Bianchi is the Director of the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (NICHD) and a Senior Investigator in the Center for Precision Health Research at the National Human Genome Research Institute (NHGRI); both are at the National Institutes of Health (NIH). She is responsible for leading a $1.6B research portfolio that focuses on children, reproductive biology and pregnancy, and physical and intellectual disabilities. She received her M.D. from Stanford University and her postgraduate training in Pediatrics, Medical Genetics and Neonatal-Perinatal Medicine at Harvard. Dr. Bianchi’s research focuses on noninvasive prenatal screening and development of novel fetal therapies for genetic disorders. She has published over 350 peer-reviewed articles and is one of four authors of Fetology: Diagnosis and Management of the Fetal Patient, which won the Association of American Publishers award for best textbook in clinical medicine in 2000.

She has held multiple leadership positions, including Presidencies of the International Society for Prenatal Diagnosis (ISPD) and the Perinatal Research Society, council memberships in the Society for Pediatric Research (SPR) and the American Pediatric Society, as a member of the board of directors in the American Society for Human Genetics. She served as the Editor-in-Chief of the journal Prenatal Diagnosis from 2007-2020. Dr. Bianchi has received the Neonatal Landmark Award from the American Academy of Pediatrics, the Maureen Andrew Award for Mentorship from the Society for Pediatric Research, the Colonel Harland Sanders Award for lifetime achievement in Medical Genetics from the American College of Medical Genetics, the Pioneer Award from ISPD, and the Health Public Service Visionary Award from the Society for Women’s Health Research. In 2013 she was elected to the National Academy of Medicine. She received a Ph.D. honoris causa from the University of Amsterdam in 2020.