Development Fund: Francesca Gaccioli

Training in the statistical software Stata

Dr Francesca Gaccioli (Obstetrics & Gynaecology)

Funding round: 2020–2021

What is your research about?

My research focuses on the alterations of placental development and function associated with pregnancy complications, such as fetal growth restriction (FGR) and pre-eclampsia (PE). Using a large biobank of samples, I undertake multi-omics approaches to compare placental samples obtained from pathological and uncomplicated pregnancies in order to study the possible underlying causes of placental insufficiency observed in FGR and PE. The overarching aim of my research is to identify clinically useful biomarkers for pregnancy complications.

What is your chosen development activity?

I am very grateful for receiving the Cambridge Reproduction SRI Development Fund, which is giving me the opportunity and the motivation to train in the software package Stata.

How will this benefit your research?

Stata allows data manipulation, visualization, statistics, and reporting, and it is particularly useful for the analysis of big datasets. My research focuses on pregnancy complications and is based on 2 very large cohorts of pregnant women, the Pregnancy Outcome Prediction (POP) study and the POP study 2, including approximately 9,000 patients. My experiments involve large numbers of samples and multi-omics approaches, and the amount of downstream results are increasingly difficult to manage. Moreover, when dealing with clinical information, it is critically important that they are handled in an accurate and safe way. Stata will allow me to easily manage and analyse these large datasets, and to safely communicate and exchange information with my collaborators.

Francesca Gaccioli is a Research Associate in the Department of Obstetrics and Gynaecology. Her research focus is on the alterations of placental development and function associated with pregnancy complications, such as fetal growth restriction and pre-eclampsia.