About Diana
From an early age, Diana’s friends and family described her as being “addicted to information,” and her inquisitive nature persists in her everyday life.
“Whenever there’s a topic that anybody has a question on, in my family or my friend group, they always ask me . . . because they know I’m so thorough with the way that I’m going to try to look for an answer; it’s kind of a running gag.”
Decoding Ocean Data
Diana’s friends and family also encouraged her to pursue what she enjoyed doing. This support led her to pursue science, where her curiosity brought her to her doctoral studies at Dalhousie University. She harnesses this investigative mindset in her scientific research, wherein she digs deep into problems to produce contextual solutions. Diana’s doctoral research investigates marine microbiomes, seeking to understand how and why they change over time in response to various environmental variables.
“I would never have thought to myself ‘I’m going to become a marine biologist.’ It was always just opportunities that came to me and I was just curious about them.”
This opportunity in particular was to investigate a multi-year microbiome time series of the Bedford Basin, a large enclosed bay forming the inner portion of the Halifax Harbour. Diana looks at how the microbial communities respond to environmental disturbances such as hurricanes and floods. She likens her role in bioinformatics to that of a “skimmer,” where she sifts through messy data to extract relevant biological signals from noise. Diana has also tackled complex bioinformatics endeavors like tool development, workflow optimization, technical biases and reproducibility.
Expanding Her Horizons
Diana sought to broaden her bioinformatics expertise from environmental microbiology to more diverse applications, with her sights set on clinical and biomedical spaces. To do this, she was awarded a CBH Training Award in Spring 2025 to attend the ISMB/ECCB 2025 conference in Liverpool, England. Diana intentionally immersed herself in this bioinformatics conference to identify and subsequently address her knowledge and skill gaps to prepare for the career she aspired to.
Diana’s experience came at a pivotal moment in her studies as she was nearing completion and beginning to explore a transition from microbial ecology into clinical bioinformatics. She chose this conference specifically as an opportunity to broaden her bioinformatics knowledge beyond her current field and to build new professional connections. “I really insisted on going to that event because I saw it as a networking opportunity,” she recalls, and she made a deliberate effort to meet researchers from different backgrounds.
Importantly, the conference allowed her to meet people who demonstrated that changing career paths was possible after a Ph.D. “It really allowed me to connect with people that came from a background similar to mine, trying to switch careers up,” she says. At the conference, she envisioned how the bioinformatics skills she had developed during her PhD could be carried into new areas of research.
“I really value the experience I got at the Bioinformatics conference,” she reflects. “That was an opportunity specifically at that time of my PhD that I valued so much. So I just want to say I was so grateful for that opportunity. It was amazing.”
Into the Clinic
Dr. Haider successfully defended her Ph.D. thesis in June 2026. Now, Diana is using her environmental ecology skills in a new environment: the clinic. She has taken on an exciting new role as a Data Analyst at the Centre de recherche du CHU Sainte-Justine in Montréal, QC. It is the largest research institute of mother-and-child health in Canada.
You can connect with Diana on LinkedIn: Diana Haider
