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Diana Pabst Parsell is a versatile freelancer whose work has been published in print or online by Scientific American, National Geographic, Smithsonian, The Washington Post, Science News, The Indonesian Observer, Humanities, The New Physician, Ford Foundation Report, Education Daily and others. She has also worked in the public information offices of several major scientific organizations, producing a variety of publications.

Diana began her editorial career three decades ago after graduating cum laude with a B.A. degree in English from Marietta College in Ohio. She moved to Washington, D.C., and learned editing, publication design and production skills in a post-graduate certificate program at George Washington University. She subsequently worked several years as an editorial layout assistant for the art director of National Geographic.

In the 1980s she left to complete an M.A. in journalism at the University of Missouri. Showing a talent for writing about science and medicine, she was awarded a Nate Haseltine Fellowship in Science Writing. She also received a Rotary Foundation Graduate Fellowship and spent a year in Cape Town, South Africa.

With reporting jobs hard to get because of a recession, she began freelancing in Washington, D.C., while working nights as an on-call copy editor at The Washington Post. Over the next decade she reported on education, medicine and health issues for a wide range of publications. She also spent a summer in Paris working as a summer relief editor at the International Herald-Tribune.

Diana later worked as a writer-editor for the National Institutes of Health (where she received an Award for Outstanding Performance), the World Resources Institute and the American Association for the Advancement of Science. At AAAS she was a member of the team that developed EurekAlert, a website for news of research advances.

From 1997-99 Diana lived with her economist husband in Jakarta, where she did freelance writing and editorial consulting. She was a volunteer tour guide at the National Museum and headed a project to update and reissue the Indonesian Heritage Society's Jakarta Explorer guidebook. Once back in the States, she became a temporary fulltime staff writer and editor for online National Geographic News, specializing in science topics. She helped the news editor build the site from about 300,000 site visits a month to more than 1.3 million. For the past decade she has traveled periodically to Southeast Asia for editorial assignments at the Earth Observatory of Singapore; the WorldFish Center in Penang, Malaysia; and the Center for International Forestry Research in Bogor, Indonesia.

In recent years Diana has expanded her writing interests to include creative nonfiction. In 2007 she completed an M.A. in writing at Johns Hopkins University, where she was named an Outstanding Graduate. Her essays have appeared initially in Potomac Review and The Washingtonian. In 2008 she had a residency fellowship at Virginia Center for the Creative Arts.

Embracing travel opportunities whenever possible, Diana has camped in the desert of Namibia, crisscrossed Corsica by train, attended Mardi Gras in Haiti, hiked the Baliem Valley of Indonesian New Guinea, glided by motorized canoe up the Mahakam River in Borneo, sailed on a teak schooner through Indonesia’s East Nusa Tenggara islands and toured Andalusia by motorcycle with her husband.

Diana has done teaching in both formal and informal settings. Years ago she taught English composition as an adjunct instructor at Montgomery College in Takoma Park, Md. While working in Asia she developed a scientific writing workshop for researchers in Malaysia and Cambodia, and in Jakarta she gave classes on English usage for staff of The Indonesian Observer. She is now a writing workshop leader for the Washington Center for Psychoanalysis.

Diana currently lives with her husband in Falls Church, Virginia. She continues freelancing and is doing research for a nonfiction book.

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