Diana Kolev studied German Linguistics, General Linguistics, and Phonetics at the University of Cologne. In 2021 she completed her PhD on the neural processing of language in the brain at the University of Groningen in the Netherlands. As a postdoc at the Donders Centre for Cognitive Neuroimaging (DCCN) in Nijmegen, Netherlands, she investigated the neurocognitive aspects of language and gesture, and participated in programs for science transfer. Diana Kolev came back to Cologne in 2016 as a recipient of the Humboldt postdoctoral scholarship. In 2018 she became an interim professor in Linguistics. In September 2020 Diana Kolev took over the project management and the coordination of the initiative of the Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF) and the federal states Transfer of Language Education, Reading and Writing Support (BiSS-Transfer).