Diana M. Thomas received her Ph.D. from the Georgia Institute of Technology in 1996. She then completed a National Research Council funded post-doctoral fellowship at the United States Military Academy and the Army Research Laboratory. In 2000, she joined the faculty of the Montclair State University where she was a professor of mathematics for 17 years. She also served as the director of the Montclair State University Center for Quantitative Obesity Research. Dr. Thomas is currently a professor of discipline at the United States Military Academy at West Point. She holds joint research appointments at the Columbia University New York Obesity Research Center and the Pennington Biomedical Research Center and serves on the editorial board for the European Journal of Clinical Nutrition, PloS One, and Nutrition and Diabetes. She has published over 130 peer-reviewed articles in exercise, fitness, nutrition, and body weight regulation relying on diverse mathematical methods ranging from differential equations to machine learning. Some of the questions she is investigating are “Why do individuals not lose weight during exercise?”, “How can we objectively monitor diet in humans?”, and “Does body shape and posture predict injury?” Her work has been covered by the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Fitness Magazine, Good Housekeeping, CBS News, and ABC News.
