Francesca Cavalcanti graduated cum laude in Medicine and Surgery in 1988 and specialized cum laude in Neurology in 1992 at the “Federico II” University of Naples “.
During a post-graduate (1989-1990) training in Neurogenetics at the Department of Cellular and Molecular Biology and Pathology “L. Califano”, “Federico II” University of Naples, she acquired considerable expertise in molecular biology procedures. During the period from 1990 to 1998 she carried out her activity aimed at biomedical scientific research in the field of molecular genetics of hereditary ataxias and spastic paraparesis at the laboratories of the Department of Cellular and Molecular Biology and Pathology “L. Califano "of the “Federico II” University of Naples, benefiting from a two-year (1990-1991) CNR scholarship, a six-month (1992-1993) assignment of scientific collaboration conferred by the Department of Systematic Pathology of the same University, a two-year 1994-1996) scholarship awarded by the Neuromed Institute of Pozzilli (Is), an annual (1997) scholarship awarded by the Italian Association for the Ataxic Syndromes and a Study Award from the Telethon Foundation.(April 1998).
During this eight years of research activity, she contributed to the cloning of the Friedreich's Ataxia gene, for which she received the "E. Pugliese " award from the “S. Anna Institute”, Crotone. She also collaborated to the mapping of the hereditary recessive spastic paraparesis SPG7 gene.
Since September 1998 she has been working at the CNR as a researcher and since January 2006 as senior researcher. He carries out basic and applied clinical research in the field of molecular genetics of neurodegenerative diseases, in particular spinocerebellar ataxias and Parkinson's disease, aimed at identifying the genetic determinants and understanding the mechanisms underlying these diseases.
She has collaborated and collaborates to national and international research projects in the field of her research interest. Supervisor of undergraduates and PhD students. In recent times, her research interests focused on the genomic characterization of patients with Parkinson's disease using high-throughput next-generation sequencing technologies in order to: identify new mutations in known genes and new potential causative variants, study the pathogenetic role of the variants found and contribute to a deeper knowledge of the neurodegenerative disease.
She authored 60 peer-reviewed articles and 3 textbook chapters and several conference proceedings in the field of neurodegenerative diseases and their genetic determinants.
H-index24
Citations5496 (Google Scholar)
Research Activity Genetic and genomic aspects of neurodegeneration
