Diana W. Bianchi, M.D.

Diana W. Bianchi is the Director of the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (NICHD), overseeing an annual budget of approximately $1.6 billion supporting NICHD’s mission to lead research and training to understand human development, improve reproductive health, enhance the lives of children and adolescents, and optimize abilities for all. Dr. Bianchi received her M.D. from Stanford University School of Medicine and her postgraduate training in Pediatrics, Medical Genetics and Neonatal-Perinatal Medicine at Boston Children’s Hospital and Harvard Medical School. Dr. Bianchi’s research focuses on prenatal genomics with the goal of advancing noninvasive prenatal DNA screening and diagnosis to develop new therapies for genetic disorders that can be administered prenatally. She is a member of the National Academy of Medicine and a past president of the Perinatal Research Society and the International Society for Prenatal Diagnosis. Dr. Bianchi has received multiple awards, including the American Academy of Pediatrics’ Neonatal Landmark Award (2015), the Society for Pediatric Research’s Maureen Andrew Award for Mentorship (2016), and the March of Dimes’ Colonel Harland Sanders Award for lifetime achievement in Medical Genetics (2017). In 2020, she received the Society for Women’s Health Research’s Health Public Service Visionary Award. Dr. Bianchi was a finalist for the Samuel J. Heyman Service to America Medals in 2022 and honored as a Forbes 50 over 50 awardee.