Dianna is the coordinator of the Master of Public Health in the SPHPM.  

Dianna began her career in science as a bench scientist studying viruses in the Children's Respiratory Virus Unit at the Macfarlane Burnet Centre. After 5 years studying the molecular biology of rubella virus and a PhD entitled "Characterization of rubella virus replication complexes", she left virus research and extended her bench training to genetics in the chromosome research group at the Murdochs Children Research Institute, Royal Children's Hospital. Her project involved creating human artificial chromosome using marker chromosomes. In 2000, she embarked on a career change and began a Master of Public Health (part time) at Monash University and in January, 2001 was appointed as a research fellow in the Epidemiology Modelling Group and then was the Unit coordinator of Introductory Epidemiology for over 10 years

Professor Magliano has since worked for over fifteen years in epidemiology, the majority in diabetes, cardiovascular disease and obesity research. Her more recent work involved examining the association between diabetes and cancer using large datasets. With NHMRC project grant funding, she established the ANZ Diabetes and Cancer Collaboration (ANZDCC) dataset which is a collaboration of 18 Australian cohort studies with the aim to examine the relationship between diabetes, obesity, metabolic syndrome and hypertension and cancer. Her more recent work involves exploring the trends in diabetes incidence and mortality across the globe and heads a consortium of 23 collaborators to do this work.

As a part of this broader area, she also works on the other large datasets such as the National Diabetes Service Scheme (NDSS) linked to administrative data. Work on the NDSS has led to international status attested by invitations to the Diabetes and Cancer consortium, editor roles at Diabetes Research and Clinical practice and Atherosclerosis, the presidency of the International Diabetes Epidemiology Group in 2015-2017 and to co -chair the current edition (10^th) of the Diabetes Atlas for the International Diabetes Federation.

Professor Magliano has strong epidemiological and biostatistical skills. Fifteen years of teaching of epidemiology for Monash University has meant that her conceptual skills in epidemiology are current. Furthermore, as the senior epidemiologist of the Australian Diabetes, Obesity and Lifestyle Study (AusDiab) for over 15 years, she has acquired real life epidemiological training by working directly in the field, conducting epidemiological analyses. In 2017 she was awarded a NHMRC Senior research fellowship and the Australian Jeff flack data award from the Australian Diabetes Council.

In 2021 she was awarded an Order of Australia (General Divison) for her work in epidemiology and teaching in Australia.