Diana Comuzzie is a native Texan, and according to family legend, a descendent of Stephen F. Austin. She was born in Fort Worth, Texas where one of her earliest memories is of chasing a Texas Horned Lizard through the bushes, only to have it squirt “blood” on her. Thus began a lifelong fascination with animals and what they do. She was graduated from Haltom High School where she excelled in being one of those brainy nerds, to the extent of being the President of the pretentious sounding Future Medical Leaders of America club. However, being president afforded her the opportunity to have a calf killed and necropsied in her backyard by a veterinarian who was trying to understand a mystery disease that was killing cattle in the area.
After high school, Comuzzie (well actually, then known as Diana Crowell) entered the University of Texas at Austin, majoring in, you guessed it, biology. As part of the degree, she was forced to spend a summer at the UT Port Aransas Marine Lab, living on the beach and taking summer classes. There she found the joys of biological field work, and to this day she can still be tempted to go out on a warm spring afternoon to poke around in the grass or the creek to see what she can see.
After graduation, Comuzzie served a short time teaching high school biology, but knew in her heart that she wanted to teach on a higher level. So off she went to graduate school at Southwest Texas State University for a Master’s degree in biology and Texas A&M University for a Ph.D. in Zoology. She had wonderful experiences recording sparrow vocalizations and trying to understand how birds communicate danger as a part of her Master’s degree, but the ultimate research experiences came in the Cayman Islands and on Australia’s Great Barrier Reef as she was the first to quantitatively describe sea turtle courtship and mating behavior. Comuzzie left Texas for a few years to engage in post-doctoral research at the University of Kansas. There she applied animal communication models to human speech, and she learned how good basketball can really be.
Comuzzie taught for two years at Saint Mary College in Leavenworth, Kansas, but then returned to Texas and began work at Schreiner in 1992. She teaches a variety of biology courses and serves as the health careers advisor. She has always been interested in the role of women in science, and thus directs the Expanding Your Horizons in Sciences and Mathematics Career conference for girls in 6th-8th grades. In the summers, she directs a series of science camps for boys and girls in 5th-8th grade. She is passionate about her teaching, and has been awarded the Harriet Garret Teaching Award and the Margaret Hosler Award for Excellence in Teaching. She also serves as Dean of the School of Sciences and Mathematics. She is married to Anthony G. Comuzzie, a geneticist who researches complex diseases at the Southwest Foundation for Biomedical Research, and has two sons born on the same day, exactly three years and one hour apart. Andy is 11 and wants to be a paleontologist when he grows up. Matt is 8 and wants to be a zookeeper.