Dr. Diane Dickie joined the Chemistry Department in January 2018 as a Senior Scientist and X-Ray Crystallographer. Diane will also be working with the Materials Science Department.  Her office is Room 103 in the Material Science Building.  Diane received an honors B.Sc. from Mount Allison University in Sackville, New Brunswick, where she worked on the hydroboration of novel ketoenamines under the supervision of Prof. Stephen Westcott.

She earned her Ph.D. in inorganic chemistry at Simon Fraser University in Burnaby, British Columbia in Prof. Jason Clyburne’s lab, studying substituted m-terphenyl ligands in main group and transition metal chemistry. Her postdoctoral research on the activation of carbon dioxide with main group metal amides was conducted with Prof. Richard Kemp at the University of New Mexico and the Advanced Materials Laboratory of Sandia National Laboratories in Albuquerque, New Mexico.

While in New Mexico, Diane was heavily involved in Sandia’s award-winning elementary school science-outreach program “CSI: Dognapping”, and she was promoted to the position of Research Assistant Professor in UNM’s Chemistry department. Diane’s most recent position, before arriving at the University of Virginia, was as X-ray Diffraction Facility Director at Brandeis University in Waltham, Massachusetts.

Yuan received her Ph.D. in Applied Chemistry from Nanjing Tech University, China, where her research focused on the synthesis and application of rhodamine-based small-molecule chemosensors for detecting toxic heavy metal ions. In 2017, she joined Dr. Cliff Stains group as a Postdoctoral Fellow and was promoted to Research Associate in 2023. Currently, her work focuses on developing novel near-infrared fluorophore scaffolds as bioimaging reagents for proteins, small molecules, and post-translational modifications.

PhD in Bioengineering. Research interests include complex 3D culture systems that include biomaterials as a matrix scaffold to investigate and model immunity.

I received five years of postdoctoral training in the Laurie Lab at the University of Virginia's Department of Cell Biology following my Ph.D. in Physical Chemistry from Temple University, Philadelphia. Currently, I serve as a Research Scientist in the Pires Lab at the University of Virginia’s Department of Chemistry. As a chemist, my research is dedicated to combating World Health Organization-priority pathogens through unbiased virulence factor screening integrated with a novel antibiotic discovery library. My long-term goal is to establish a leading research laboratory focused on chemistry-driven antimicrobial development against multi-drug-resistant pathogens in host systems. I have developed extensive expertise across multiple chemical and biological disciplines, including chemistry, biophysics, chemical biology, and microbiology.