Diana Bautista, Ph.D.

Diana Bautista is a HHMI Investigator and Professor in the Department of Molecular and Cell Biology and the Helen Wills Neuroscience Institute at the University of California, Berkeley. She received her bachelor’s degree in Biology & Biochemistry from the University of Oregon, her Ph.D. in Neuroscience from Stanford University with Dr. Rich Lewis and was a postdoctoral fellow in Physiology at the University of California, San Francisco with Dr. David Julius. She joined the faculty at UC Berkeley in 2008. Dr. Bautista’s lab studies the molecular and cellular mechanisms of itch, touch and pain, under normal and disease conditions. Her research has been funded by the NIH since 2009 and her work has been recognized by numerous awards, including the 2014 Society for Neuroscience Young Investigator Award, a 2016 Howard Hughes Medical Institute Scholar Award and a 2019 NIH Director's Transformative Research Award. In 2021 she was named an HHMI investigator. Her current research is focused on neuroimmune interactions in chronic pain, itch and viral-evoked inflammation.