Professor Dianna Magliano has a BAppSci (Hons), PhD, and a Master of Public Health. Professor Magliano has worked for over 20 years in epidemiology, the majority in diabetes, cardiovascular disease and obesity research. Her more recent work involved examining the association between diabetes and cancer using large datasets.

With NHMRC project grant funding, she established the ANZ Diabetes and Cancer Collaboration dataset which is a collaboration of 18 Australian cohort studies with the aim to examine the relationship between diabetes, obesity, metabolic syndrome and hypertension and cancer. Her more recent work involves exploring the trends in diabetes incidence and mortality across the globe and heads a consortium of 24 collaborators to do this work.

She has a strong international reputation evidenced by her role as an editor for Diabetes Research and Clinical Practice, the presidency of the International Diabetes Epidemiology Group in 2015–2017 and her position as co-chair to the current edition (10th) of the Diabetes Atlas for the International Diabetes Federation. Professor Magliano has strong epidemiological and biostatistical skills. As the senior epidemiologist of the Australian Diabetes, Obesity and Lifestyle Study (AusDiab) for over 18 years, she has acquired real life epidemiological training by working directly in the field, conducting epidemiological analyses.

In 2017 she was awarded a NHMRC Senior research fellowship and the Australian Jeff flack Diabetes data award from the Australian Diabetes Council and the Michaela Modan award for the best epidemiological abstract from the American Diabetes Association. In 2021, she was awarded an Order of Australia Medal for her work in epidemiology and in 2022 she was awarded a NHMRC Investigator Grant fellowship, level 2. She has a H index of 82, over 50,000 citations and has published over 340 publications. She was recently recognised by being listed in The Australian’s Research Magazine’s top 250 researchers in 2024.