Ed Diener received his bachelor's degree in 1968 at California State University at Fresno. He worked two years as an administrator for Kings View Community Mental Health Center. He attended the Ph.D. program in personality psychology at the University of Washington from 1970 to 1974, and conducted his dissertation research on deindividuation. Diener had three major mentors during graduate school: Irwin Sarason, Ronald E. Smith, and Scott Fraser.

Ed Diener is the Joseph R. Smiley Distinguished Professor of Psychology at the University of Illinois. He received his doctorate at the University of Washington in 1974, and has been a faculty member at the University of Illinois for the past 34 years. Dr. Diener was the president of both the International Society of Quality of Life Studies and the Society of Personality and Social Psychology. He was the editor of the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, and the editor of Journal of Happiness Studies. Diener is the founding editor of Perspectives on Psychological Science. He has over 240 publications, with about 190 being in the area of the psychology of well-being.

Dr. Diener is a fellow of five professional societies. Professor Diener is listed as one of the most highly cited psychologists by the Institute of Scientific Information, with over 12,000 citations to his credit. He won the Distinguished Researcher Award from the International Society of Quality of Life Studies, the first Gallup Academic Leadership Award, and the Jack Block Award for Personality Psychology. Dr. Diener has won several teaching awards, including the Oakley-Kundee Award for Undergraduate Teaching at the University of Illinois.

Professor Diener's research focuses on the measurement of well-being; temperament and personality influences on well-being; theories of well-being; income and well-being; and cultural influences on well-being. He has edited three recent books on subjective well-being, and a 2005 book on multi-method measurement in psychology. Diener is currently writing a popular book on happiness with his son, Robert Biswas-Diener, and authoring a book on policy uses of accounts of well-being with Richard Lucas, Ulrich Schimmack, and John Helliwell.