About Diana

MD, MPH

Diana Cejas, MD, MPH is a pediatric neurologist and writer in Durham, NC. She obtained her MD at Howard University College of Medicine and a MPH in Maternal and Child Health at the George Washington University prior to completing general pediatrics training in the Tulane – Oschner Pediatric Residency Program and pediatric neurology training at the University of Chicago. After her training was complete, she returned to her home state to practice medicine, to spend time with her family, and to write.

Dr. Cejas is an Assistant Professor of Neurology at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and Faculty of the Carolina Institute for Developmental Disabilities. Through her clinical work, she cares for children, adolescents, and young adults with a broad spectrum of neurodevelopmental disabilities with complex neurological and psychiatric comorbidities. She seeks to improve health outcomes in this population as they transition to adulthood and serves as Principal Investigator of studies that explore their unique experiences. After experiencing a critical illness during her residency training, Dr. Cejas has devoted much of her career to patient advocacy and improving communication between healthcare providers and the disability community, particularly young disabled patients of color.

Her writing attempts to describe what it means to have a body, how that body falls apart, and how medicine can be miraculous (if you have access to it.) Her essays have been featured in magazines including The Journal of the American Medical Association, Neurology, The Iowa Review, Ecotone, and Pleiades, among others, and have been anthologized in collections such as Disability Visibility: First-Person Stories from the Twenty-First Century and A Measure of Belonging: Twenty-One Writers of Color on the New American South. She is an alumnus of writers conferences such as Bread Loaf, Sewanee, VONA, and Tin House. She is a 2024 MacDowell Fellow, a 2023 PEN America Emerging Voices Fellowship Finalist, and a 2021 Pushcart Prize nominee. She is currently working on a memoir in essays that uses her story as both physician and patient to tell a broader story about discrimination in healthcare.