Michela's research mainly focuses on the genetic regulation of quantitative traits risk factor for common diseases. In the last years, she focused on investigating the genetic regulation of environmental risk factors for autism. Her goal is to determine if maternal exposure to environmental pollutants and immune cytokines during infections could cross the placenta and may disrupt fetal brain development and influence the fetal immune system increasing autism risk in conjunction with individual genetic susceptibility from mothers and fetuses. Also, her research focuses in understanding the sex-differences observed in autism and other diseases. She investigated SNPs responsible for the differences in males and females anthropometric traits and their role in sex-biased common diseases. Now, her goal is to clarify the sex-specific burden of rare pathogenic and likely pathogenic variants in control populations to characterize the sex-specific genetic variability and the consequences in diseases.
