Emma Cassinelli

Emma Cassinelli serves as a Research Fellow at Queen's University Belfast's School of Medicine, Dentistry and Biomedical Sciences, where she conducts critical research on preconception health using national maternity healthcare datasets from Northern Ireland and the UK. Her work focuses on identifying health inequalities and evaluating preconception care indicators through rigorous epidemiological analysis.

Dr. Cassinelli completed her PhD dissertation titled "Improving health in the preconception period: building from existing data to create pathways for future intervention" in July 2025 under the supervision of Professors McGowan, McKinley, and Kent. Her doctoral research established the methodological foundation for her current work analyzing large-scale healthcare datasets to inform public health interventions.

Her research spans multiple interconnected domains in maternal and public health. She investigates preconception health indicators through cross-sectional and longitudinal analyses of maternity data, with particular emphasis on folic acid supplementation patterns and socioeconomic determinants of health outcomes. Her methodological expertise includes systematic reviews of healthcare policies, health inequality assessments, and data-driven approaches to maternal health behavior analysis. Geographically, her work maintains a strong focus on Northern Ireland while contributing to broader UK and Irish healthcare policy discussions.

Analysis of Dr. Cassinelli's publication trajectory from 2022-2025 reveals increasing methodological sophistication and policy relevance. She has progressed from foundational cross-sectional studies to complex longitudinal analyses of maternity healthcare data spanning 2011-2021, demonstrating consistent focus on preconception health indicators while expanding her methodological toolkit to include systematic reviews of healthcare policies across multiple jurisdictions.

Dr. Cassinelli has presented her research at numerous high-impact venues including the "Preconception health in Northern Ireland" presentation at Queen's University in October 2025 and the "Spotlight on maternal preconception health inequalities" presentation in September 2025. Her work has garnered attention across academic platforms with 46 Mendeley readers for her thesis and policy citations for her research on preconception health guidelines.