Diana Ruggiero

Diana Ruggiero is PhD candidate in the Department of Botany and Plant Pathology at Oregon State University. She is researching the genetics of plant development and is using both molecular and computational approaches.

Ms. Ruggiero is currently a USDA-NIFA Predoctoral Fellow through the AFRI Education and Workforce Development program. She previously represented the ARCS Foundation as a supported graduate scholar of the Oregon Chapter.

Before starting graduate school, Diana worked for several years doing ecological restoration, landscaping, and trail work in the Pacific Northwest. She is an AmeriCorps alumna and has a B.A. in Computer Science from Bard College.

You can contact her at either:

ruggiedi@oregonstate.edu
druggiero@protonmail.com

This website was last updated March 14th, 2026.

Education

Oregon State University, College of Agricultural Sciences | Corvallis, OR

Bard College | Annandale-on-Hudson, NY

Publications

Ruggiero, D., Bang, M., Leary, M., Flieg, H., Garcia-Lamas, L., Vejlupkova, Z., Megraw, M., Jiang, D., Leiboff, S., and Fowler, J.E. "Spatial inheritance patterns across maize ears are associated with alleles that reduce pollen fitness." The Plant Journal. March 2026. [https://doi.org/10.1111/tpj.70760]

O'Hara, K., Burke, K., Ruggiero, D., and Anderson, S. "Linking Language & Thinking with Code: Computing within a Writing-Intensive Introduction to the Liberal Arts." ACM Conference on Innovation and Technology in Computer Science Education (ITiCSE). July 2017. [doi.org/10.1145/3059009.3059018]

Invited Talks

(Seminar) "Spatial inheritance patterns across maize earsare associated with alleles that reduce pollen fitness." Zeavolution Seminar. Virtual. October 2025

(Short Talk) "Quantitative genetics of leaf vascular density in maize." 67th Annual Maize Genetics Meeting. St. Louis, MO. March 2025

(Lightning Talk) "Understanding leaf vascular density through quantitative genetics and high-throughput phenotyping." 66th Annual Maize Genetics Meeting, Development Premeeting. Raleigh, NC. March 2024

(Lightning Talk) "Quantitative genetics and high-throughput phenotyping of maize leaf vascular traits." 65th Annual Maize Genetics Meeting, Development Premeeting. St. Louis, MO. March 2023

(Podcast Interview) Genome Insider S3 Episode 2: Better Crops With a Pointillist Approach to Plant Genomics. DOE Joint Genome Institute. August 2022

(Short Talk) "Combinatorial barcoding for single-nucleus sequencing of developing maize leaf primordia." Plant Biology 2022, American Society of Plant Biologists. Portland, OR. July 2022

(Lightning Talk) "Single-cell genomics and high-throughput phenotyping for determining the quantitative genetics of maize leaf vascular development." 64th Annual Maize Genetics Meeting. St. Louis, MO. March 2022

Fellowships

Awards

Teaching

Oregon State University, Graduate TA:
 BOT 101: Botany: A Human Concern - Introductory Botany for Non-Majors (In-Person)
 BI 204: Introductory Biology I (Virtual)
 BI 205: Introductory Biology II (Virtual)

Bard College, Undergraduate TA:
 CS 143: Object-Oriented Programming with Robots (In-Person)
 CS 117: Interactive Systems (In-Person)

Outreach and Leadership

Current Research Projects

My research concerns the developmental genetics of veins in the leaves of Zea mays. My main approach consists of a GWAS (Genome-Wide Association Study) of vein phenotypes over a large panel of over 700 different maize lines. I am particularly interested in vascular traits which differ between C₃ and C₄ plants, and thus how natural variation in maize vascular traits can help uncover genes related to the establishment of C₄ vascular anatomy.

I am interested in using computational approaches within plant science; as such I am developing an automated phenotyping tool using neural nets to facilitate my GWAS data collection. I am also exploring computational models of genetic regulatory networks and plant morphogenesis.

More on all this coming soon!

Published Projects

Hot off the (virtual) presses! Things I actually finished??

Spatial Inheritance Patterns Across Maize Ears

Ruggiero, D., Bang, M., Leary, M., Flieg, H., Garcia-Lamas, L., Vejlupkova, Z., Megraw, M., Jiang, D., Leiboff, S., and Fowler, J.E. "Spatial inheritance patterns across maize ears are associated with alleles that reduce pollen fitness." The Plant Journal. March 2026. [https://doi.org/10.1111/tpj.70760]

Summary: Can we identify gene variants (alleles) associated with spatial patterns across the maize ear, such as having more of a certain kernel color towards the top or bottom? Furthermore, are alleles associated with the reduced reproductive fitness of pollen more likely to exhibit spatial effects?

We used fluorescently-tagged insertion lines, a maize-ear scanner system, and a object-detection neural network to phenotype >1300 maize ears across five years of field seasons. We analyzed these phenotypic data to assess the statistical evidence for spatial trends across 58 alleles, finding that yes, there are are alleles associated with spatial patterns, and yes, alleles with pollen transmission defects are more strongly associated with spatial patterns than alleles with Mendelian transmission.

The diversity of observed patterns was surprising, as they were not solely in keeping with the expectation that pollen fitness defects would condition a pattern of higher transmission towards the apex. This suggests possible influences on pollen competition outside of pollen tube growth rate alone.

This was a side project synthesizing the contributions of many people across the Plant Function 1 group at OSU BPP, particularly those in the Fowler Lab.