Diana holds a B.A. in Biology from the University of Iowa and has served as the Lab Manager for the Groblewski Lab in the Nutritional Sciences Department since its inception in 1998. In my free time, I enjoy spending time with my husband and three children, exercising, baking cookies for family & friends, going back to Iowa to work on our family’s farmhouse, barn and land, and hiking in the mountains or relaxing at the beach.
For the last 20 years I have gained extensive experience in in vivo, biochemical and microscopic techniques to analyze pancreatic function. In particular I have extensive training in immunofluorescence and electron microscopic analysis of acinar cells as well as various methods for assessing secretory activity of isolated acini and at the single cell level. My independent work in acinar biology uncovered a secretory role for the acinar specific protein D52. Moreover, I was a lead author in our seminal observation that acinar cells contain subsets of zymogen granules based on their expression of SNARE proteins necessary for exocytosis and perfected the immunofluorescent labeling of externalized proteins that enabled our lab to further separate the minor regulated secretory pathway labeling externalized LAMP1 from the zymogen granule secretory pathway by labeling Synaptotagmin 1. My most current project entails perfecting an assay to purify exosomes secreted specifically from the MRP of the pancreatic acinar cell.