CBBS Graduate Student Profile: Diana Flores
New research into ancient squash comes from Russia with love

Working with passion and patience at the intersection of science, art and nature provides the perfect checklist for West Texas research, and Diana Flores checks all the boxes for her new role at Sul Ross State University and the Center for Big Bend Studies.

Flores is one of the first students accepted into the new Anthropology graduate degree program at Sul Ross. A May 2026 graduate, she’ll be redefining some of her undergraduate botany research to work in tandem with CBBS on ancient plant life.

“Basically, I am interested in ancient plants in the human context and beyond,” she says. “I guess it’s a mouthful, but I am coming into it with a paleoarchaeobotany focus.”

At the suggestion of Dr. Bryon Schroeder, CBBS senior research scientist, Flores will focus on ancient squash. He told Flores that studying the history of squash was an important research focus. Squash was first valued as a storage vessel for its tough rind, but later became more important as a food source.  Schroeder recently contributed important data to the study of ancient maize (corn) that demonstrated Indigenous groups began using it more than 2,000 years ago.  Researching the use of squash will likewise significantly impact our understanding of Indigenous lifeways.

“They’re finding all these squash rinds and seed remains in rock shelters around Texas, and we know that squash originated in Mexico and then spread outward,” she says. “All squash used to be wild, spread by megafauna, like giant sloths and mastodons.”

When those giants disappeared from the landscape, humans had to fill the role of seed dispersers and cultivators. That evolution included travel and trade, so Flores will try to connect the dots to tell the full story.

“It’s an interesting species to study because it’s changed so much just by human influence,” Flores says. “The ultimate goal of my project is to understand the domestication process, specifically in the Trans-Pecos — the routes those seeds took, were people trading them, were they growing them, were they changing them here?”

She hopes to split her time between lab work and field work.

“It’s a lot of digging, breathing in dirt and measuring things — it’s methodical but not very glamorous,” she says of fieldwork. “But in Texas, there are a lot of dry rock shelters, the perfect environment for plants to be able to be preserved.”

A McNair Scholar, Flores returned to school after eight years in marketing, but her fascinating life started far away from West Texas. Born in Russia, Flores’ family moved to the U.S. when she was 13, living for a while in California before settling in Texas. (Her Chilean grandfather met her Russian grandmother while he was studying in Russia.)

“I really love Texas, and I feel like Texans are very similar to Russians in their heartiness,” Flores says. “Both deal with these very extreme climates, so they have a deep respect for the force of nature. Russia is a tough place that builds tough people. I feel that way about Texas as well.”

Flores feels at home in Texas, where she graduated from a tiny private high school in Austin. She looks forward to the intimacy of smaller Sul Ross classrooms and fieldwork at promising sites around the area. Unfounded insecurity kept her from studying science when she first attended American University, but a reassuring professor and an internship with NASA set her on the path she follows today.

“I just never saw myself in that light of someone who could do that. But the fact that a woman scientist and professor I admired thought I could … I was very inspired by that.”

Flores’ studies spill over to her personal pursuits in an artistic fashion. Her creative streak drives her to make cyanotypes, a Victorian Era photography method. Objects are set out in the sun on photosensitive painted paper or stone to capture their shadow as art. Diana sometimes stains them with tea or coffee to get different colors.

“It’s a very calming kind of process, very hands-on,” she explains of the 24-hour process. “A lot of them turn out pretty badly — sometimes it’s like a 50-50. But it’s fun. You can also tone them with like tea or coffee to get different colors.”

A few years ago, Diana discovered that the very first photography book was a botany book by a woman who used the cyanotype process to capture plants and was inspired to try it out. Now she dreams of making her own cyanotype botany book, but for Texas specifically. For now, she’s building up a collection to display at galleries.

The patient pleasure she finds in her artwork displays the disposition needed for the rather tedious field and lab work needed for this research. She calls the lab a “dungeon” but feels thrilled with the results she can obtain with the electron microscope.

“After three hours of looking at cells, I start to lose my mind — I get stressed out and everything looks the same,” Flores says. “I think I’m not going to find anything, that I have no clue what I’m looking at. But later, I go and look at the microscope photos I took, and they’re really, really, cool. So I get excited, but I almost always first have a moment of despair.”

Sul Ross and CBBS are also excited to see what this new opportunity will bring for Flores and the research of the past Indigenous people in the Trans-Pecos. Stay tuned!