Giulia Baldazzi has been awarded a Fulbright Scholarship!

Giulia Baldazzi, non-tenure assistant professor in our group, has been awarded a Fulbright Scholarship for a research period in the United States, under the Research Scholar category, for the academic year 2023-24.

Since 1948, the Fulbright Program award the most deserving students and researchers to study, do relevant research, and teach in Italy and the United States.

Thanks to this prestigious award, Giulia Baldazzi will spend a 4-month period as visiting researcher at Emory University School of Medicine in Atlanta, Georgia. Her research topic, entitled “Advances in Noninvasive Fetal Electrocardiography for Large-Scale Continuous Antenatal Monitoring”, will be developed under the supervision of Prof. Reza Sameni (Emory University School of Medicine, Atlanta, GA, USA).

The project:

Noninvasive fetal electrocardiography (fECG) represents a promising technique for assessing fetal well-being in early pregnancy. Unlike conventional ultrasound methods, fECG can assess the electrical activity of the fetal heart unobtrusively, by applying surface electrodes onto the maternal abdomen. However, the low quality of fECG signals extracted from abdominal recordings limits its use in conventional clinical practice.
This project aims to devise advanced signal processing methods for accurate noninvasive fECG recovery, that can cope with different fetal presentations and fetal movements. In the future, these software tools could be leveraged to provide large-scale continuous fetal monitoring, even in low-income countries, using wearable, low-cost, risk-free technologies.