WhyIScience Q&A: How a chemist moved to the business side of science

Diane Diehl excelled in math and science as a student, but in high school, she also got a taste for business. During summers, she worked at her father’s small engineering firm in Wheeling, Illinois, managing the office, handling payroll, and making sure vendors got paid. As an undergraduate student at the University of Notre Dame, she combined her dual interests, majoring in chemistry and minoring in business. 

After earning a PhD in analytical chemistry from Indiana University, Diehl worked for more than 20 years at Dow AgroSciences and then at Waters Corporation, a chemical instrumentation and software company. She started off as a chemist at the bench but soon moved into marketing, business development, and management, leading large, international teams of scientists. She joined the Broad Institute, as director of scientific operations with Count Me In (CMI), a patient-partnered research effort that works directly with cancer patients across the US and Canada to collect and analyze their medical and genetic information to accelerate research. As CMI becomes part of the Broad’s Genomics Platform, she will be leading internal business development.
 
We spoke with Diehl about how she shifted her career toward business and how she combines her scientific and management skills to keep research moving forward.

What is your role with Count Me In at Broad?

I was hired back in 2022 to essentially scale and functionalize the operations of the team. I was brought in as someone with experience in organizational design, running groups, and being in a more commercial environment. So my goal was to help build CMI into something that’s more sustainable and scalable.

More recently, we’ve realized that CMI’s patient-partnered capabilities and expertise, combined with the offerings from the Genomics Platform, could be valuable to other research groups within Broad and beyond. So now we’re trying to expand our reach and the types of projects we work on. That means I’m overseeing more business development, looking for opportunities for us to partner with Broad researchers to help support their science.

You did a lot of different things at Waters. How did you make the transition into more business-focused roles?

I started out as an analytical chemist at the bench but after my time in grad school, I was kind of done with lab work. Pretty early on in my career, both at Dow and also at Waters, I expressed interest in managing people. For almost my entire time at Waters, I was managing small teams and then larger teams. I did a lot of marketing, product development, and business development. I had a lot of opportunities to learn a bunch of different things, and I had great managers who always took some time during our one-on-one’s to say: “Let’s talk about your career. What do you want to do? What are you interested in?” I was always making sure to have those career conversations with my bosses.

I remember I had one boss who asked me to take on more of a lead role in developing new product applications. When he was promoted, I was offered his role in managing the whole applications lab. At the time, I was about to go on maternity leave, but the VP of the division still gave me the job. I was just super supported. And then over the years, there were different opportunities, and for quite a few of them, I was lucky to be in the right place at the right time.

How did you learn to do business development and marketing? Did you take classes?

A lot of the time, I just got thrown into the deep end and I had to figure it out, and I did. I learned a lot on the job. I’ve also taken a lot of business classes. I have a certificate in Strategy Development from Columbia Business School. But I don’t have an MBA. At the time, I couldn’t figure out how to do night school and be a mom of two kids and work full-time at a job where I had to commute.

But if there’s one thing I could do all over again, I’d figure out a way to get an MBA, maybe by taking more time to do it. In the eyes of some people, having an MBA is important, so that would have been valuable. But fundamentally, I still feel it’s more impactful to have on-the-job experience.

What’s been the most rewarding part of your work? 

Managing people. And managing people through their career. The kinds of opportunities that I was given, I try to give to the people that I manage. I have had a lot of people, especially at Waters, who went on to become vice presidents and senior directors over the course of their career. That to me is just so rewarding. And even now through LinkedIn, I see all these people that used to work for me and all of the great work that they're doing. Knowing that for one small bit of time, I had some influence on what they've done or the direction they've gone in, I take a lot of pride in that. Sometimes I'll get an email or a text saying: “Diane, thank you so much for everything that you've done for me over my career.”

I'm very passionate, and even more so in recent years, about being able to translate science in such a way that my grandmother could understand what we're doing and understands the need for it. If what I can do on a daily basis continues to advance science in whatever way I can, then I feel like I am in the right role.

What’s the most important thing you’ve learned during your career so far? 

I would say: don't get too comfortable being comfortable. What I mean by that is: in whatever position you're in, keep asking questions, keep asking what else you can do, what else you can learn, read reputable articles, talk to people, network. There's always so much to learn and so much more that you can do. 

It's easy, once you get into a position and into a routine, to get comfortable. But as scientists, we're all trained to ask questions and to not lose that sense of curiosity. And don't lose the “why”. Ask “Why is that so? Why are we doing it that way?” Keep asking those questions and keep seeking new opportunities.