About
Dentist. Writer. Thinker.
Student of life.
For as long as she can remember, Dr. Diana Wu has wanted to understand how to live well. Not as an abstract exercise — as a genuine, lifelong pursuit. While other kids read fiction, she read books about the mind, the self, the question of what a human life is actually for. She was never looking for entertainment. She was looking for answers. Or better questions. Or both.
The questions that have shaped her are simple and enormous: What is a life well lived? What does it mean to fulfill the potential you were given? What does it look like to have a life not just long, but as wide and deep and full as it can possibly be? These are not dental questions. They are human ones. And they are the thread that runs through everything she does — the practice, the writing, the ongoing work of paying attention.
She is a dentist, a writer, and a student of life — in that order of credential, but not of identity. The dentistry is where she has spent her days for over fourteen years. The writing is where she thinks out loud. And the student part — that started first, and has never stopped.
The Academic Record
Dr. Wu's intellectual formation began early and ran deep. Growing up in the Philippines, she earned First Honors every year at Faith Christian School and received the Don Sergio Osmeña Sr. Academic Excellence Award — a city-wide distinction in Cebu City. She won a national academic competition as a student, and maintained the President's List every semester at Cebu Doctors' University College of Dentistry.
She carried that foundation to the United States, earning a place on the Dean's List and the Dean's Perfect Scholar designation at Old Dominion University, and was inducted into Tau Sigma Honor Society — reserved for high-achieving transfer students. At Indiana University School of Dentistry, she graduated as one of the top students in her class, earning induction into Omicron Kappa Upsilon, the national dental honor society that recognizes the highest-caliber graduates in the country.
During dental school, she was a three-time presenting author at the IUSD Annual Research Day — a rare distinction across three consecutive years — and received the Hinman Student Research Symposium Award for Excellence in Student Research. She was awarded the Eleanor J. Bushee Award by the American Association of Women Dentists for academic excellence and outstanding leadership. Her research caught the attention of the director of the National Institute of Dental and Craniofacial Research, who personally invited her to Washington D.C. — a distinction that signaled just how far her academic trajectory might have taken her.
She was not someone who struggled to succeed. She was someone who succeeded — consistently, across every environment she entered — in a field she had not chosen for herself. The question that has quietly driven her ever since: if she could do that doing something she was given, what might be possible doing something she loves?
The Clinical Philosophy
Dr. Wu founded Issaquah Premier Dental in 2017. Her approach to dentistry is defined by one principle above all others: long-horizon thinking. Most dental care is reactive — something hurts, something breaks, it gets fixed. Dr. Wu practices differently. From the first appointment, she is already thinking about what a patient's mouth needs to look like five, ten, fifteen, twenty years from now, and building a plan to get there before the problems arise.
Her advanced training spans some of the most rigorous programs available in dentistry, including the full curriculum of the Kois Center, advanced implant and regenerative surgery under Dr. Istvan Urban in Budapest, restorative and aesthetic training at CDOCS in Scottsdale, a CBCT radiology mini-residency at UC San Diego, and myofunctional therapy certification. She has trained in functional occlusion, airway health, TMJ, full mouth rehabilitation, and facial aesthetics — because she understands that the mouth does not exist in isolation from the rest of the body, and that treating it as if it does is a form of incomplete care.
The Writing
Dr. Wu writes about what the practice of dentistry — and medicine more broadly — reveals about how we live. Her essays explore the oral-systemic connection, the quiet cost of a healthcare system that exhausts the people who sustain it, what long clinical careers make possible that short ones cannot, and the particular kind of wisdom that only accumulates through decades of showing up for the same patients, watching their lives unfold, and being trusted with their health across time.
She writes as a practitioner, a learner, and someone who has navigated her own passage through illness, burnout, and the slow process of rebuilding a life on more honest terms. Her voice is not that of an authority dispensing answers. It is the voice of someone in the middle of the work — asking better questions, sharing what she has found, and believing that honest reflection passed forward is one of the more useful things a person can offer.
The Person
Dr. Wu grew up dancing, singing, playing guitar and piano, and performing with a show choir and pop jazz dance group in the Philippines. She is a semi-professional videographer and photographer who chases beautiful landscapes with a drone. She is a hiker, a movie buff, a golfer in progress, and someone who takes food with great seriousness. She lives in the Pacific Northwest, which she finds endlessly beautiful and consistently underrated.
She built this work — the practice, the writing, all of it — for people who want to be genuinely cared for. If that's you, you're in the right place.