Diane Turnshek teaches college astronomy classes in Pittsburgh. She writes science fiction stories with an eye to the stars and taught writing classes at CMU and St. Vincent. She has been on the Board of Directors for both SFWA and Parsec, Pittsburgh’s premier science fiction charitable organization. For nine years, she mentored graduate students at Seton Hill's MFA Writing Popular Fiction program. She is the founder of WorD, a critique group, Alpha, a teen writing workshop, the CMU Speculative Fiction Lecture Series and Triangulation, a yearly themed genre anthology, which she is currently editing. She crewed the Mars Desert Research Station in Utah, took first place with her team in the 2017 "Life in Space" competition to make life better for astronauts and earned second place in the international 2017 Mars City Design competition. She is now working on making a light pollution map of Pittsburgh with drones.