Diane Rover has been a professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Iowa State University since 2001, and was named University Professor in 2015. She currently serves as the director for two large-scale, NSF-funded programs: IINspire LSAMP is an alliance of sixteen institutions in Iowa, Illinois and Nebraska to broaden participation in STEM; and SP@ISU is a campus-wide program to support the broader impacts work of faculty. She is principal investigator of an NSF grant at ISU to investigate STEM faculty engagement with broader impacts. She is also co-PI for a nation-wide grant to establish the National Alliance for Broader Impacts. She has also been the principal investigator on NSF STEP and S-STEM grants at Iowa State that have focused on the recruitment, retention and success of engineering students. Dr. Rover has served on the IEEE Committee on Engineering Accreditation Activities and on the IEEE Education Society Board of Governors. She represented IEEE on the Engineering Accreditation Commission of ABET from 2009-2014 and began a term on the EAC Executive Committee in 2015. She began serving as an IEEE ABET program evaluator for computer engineering in 2002. From 1996-1998, she was director of technical activities for the IEEE Southeastern Michigan Section. Starting in 2009, she held officer positions in the ASEE ECE Division. She served as program chair for the ECE Division for the 2010 ASEE Annual Conference. From 2000-2008, she led the Academic Bookshelf column as a senior associate editor for the ASEE Journal of Engineering Education.

Dr. Rover was appointed Associate Dean for Academic and Student Affairs in the College of Engineering from 2004-2010. Prior to that, she served as associate chair for undergraduate education in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering from 2003-2004. She began her academic career at Michigan State University, where, from 1991-2001, she held the positions of assistant professor and associate professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering. From 1997 to 2000, she served as director of the undergraduate program in computer engineering at MSU. She also served as interim department chair in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering from 2000 to 2001. She was a research staff member in the Scalable Computing Laboratory at the Ames Laboratory under a U.S-D.O.E. Postdoctoral Fellowship from 1989 to 1991. She received the B.S. degree in computer science in 1984, and the M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in computer engineering in 1986 and 1989, respectively, from Iowa State University. She was the first woman to receive a Ph.D. in computer engineering at ISU. Her teaching and research has focused on the areas of embedded computer systems, reconfigurable hardware, integrated program development and performance environments for parallel and distributed systems, visualization, performance monitoring and evaluation, and engineering education.

Dr. Rover is a 2016 IEEE Fellow, 2012 ASEE Fellow and member of the IEEE Computer Society, the IEEE Education Society, and the ASEE. She currently serves as a representative for Iowa State in the National Center for Women and Information Technology (NCWIT). She received an NSF CAREER Award in 1996.