Diana Marcela Bolaños Rodríguez facts for kids

Diana Marcela Bolaños Rodríguez is a smart Colombian marine biologist. She studies and sorts different kinds of tiny sea creatures called platyhelminths. These are a group of simple, soft-bodied animals. In 2010, she won a special award called the L'Oréal-UNESCO Fellowship for Women in Science. She was also chosen as the top biologist in Colombia in 2012. The BBC named her one of the ten best women scientists in Latin America in 2013.

Meet Diana Bolaños: Marine Biologist

Diana Bolaños Rodríguez was born in 1981 in Bogotá, Colombia. She grew up in this big city. When she was 19, she started college at the Universidad Jorge Tadeo Lozano. This campus was in Santa Marta, right by the Caribbean Sea in Colombia.

Her Journey to Science

Diana finished her first degree with a project about flatworms. These are a type of platyhelminth. In 2003, she went to the University of New Hampshire (UNH) in the United States. She earned her PhD in zoology from UNH in 2008. Zoology is the study of animals. She even won an award for her excellent research there.

Her main research was about polyclad flatworms. These are special marine worms. They can regrow parts of their bodies using stem cells. Stem cells are like blank cells that can turn into different types of cells.

Awards and Recognition

After her studies, Diana married Joseph Dunn, an American she met in New Hampshire. In 2008, she moved back to Colombia. She kept working on her research. She also created a list of flatworm species and how they are grouped. Diana also started teaching at the University of the Andes.

In 2010, she received the L'Oréal-UNESCO Fellowship for Women in Science. She used this award to continue her research at the University of the Andes. Later, Diana became a professor at the Universidad de Cartagena. In 2012, she was named Colombia's biologist of the year. The next year, in 2013, the BBC recognized her as one of the top ten women scientists in Latin America.

What She Studies Now

Diana Bolaños continues her important research. She compares polyclads, planarians, and other platyhelminths. She wants to understand how they all regrow their body parts. She has also written many articles for science magazines. These articles are about how living things change over time (called evolution) and how they are grouped (called biological systematics).

She also keeps learning new things. For example, she took a course from the Society for Developmental Biology in Montevideo, Uruguay. In 2019, a new flatworm was named Bisacculosuteri marcelae in her honor. This shows how important her work is!

See also

In Spanish: Diana Marcela Bolaños para niños