Linda C. Giudice is an American gynecologist and obstetrician whose research has focused on the genetics of infertility, endometriosis, and the mechanisms of the menstrual cycle, along with the impacts of environmental pollutants on women's fertility.
Her postdoctoral fellowships introduced her to translational medicine and the genetics of women's health, resulting in her returning to her studies to obtain a medical degree.
Born in Brooklyn, New York to an immigrant family, with a Sicilian father and a second generation mother whose parents were from Italy, Giudice was taught strong values about education from a young age.
This focus resulted in her repeatedly skipping grades in both elementary and high school and openly pursuing her interests in math and science, along with many other fields as well.
After starting classes at Columbia University, however, she found that chemistry was of greater interest to her and changed her major to obtain a Bachelor's of Science in chemical engineering.
[1] She spent two decades at Stanford before transferring to the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF) in 2005 to become the Chair of the Department of Obstetrics and Gynecology and Reproductive Sciences.
Recruiting multiple new professors during her tenure, she also worked with Kaiser Permanente to fund the University of California, Berkeley's Undergraduate Research Intern Program.
This finding, alongside her lab's later reveal that IGFBP-4's protease comes from the trophoblast, helped further explain how IGFs function as a whole and their importance beyond just reproduction, but also in the field of oncology's research on cancer development.
These and many others were identified from the microarrays and were used by Giudice to create an entire endometrium transcriptome to allow for more factors to be isolated and to potentially find ways to prevent endometriosis.
This also led them, alongside Karen Smith-McCune, to determine that certain oral contraceptives and intrauterine devices using levonorgestrel caused proinflammatory markers with possible health effects to emerge.
They did a full description of the methylome for endometrial cells and found correlations with expression changes in the already made transcriptome, allowing for greater understanding and treatment of reproductive problems with targeted hormone therapy.
[1] When asked by a patient if her infertility issues might be related to local water pollution with endocrine disruptors, Giudice decided to conduct an investigation into the possibility.
[1] Having held membership and leadership positions in multiple professional societies, Giudice also has been on the council for the nonprofit March of Dimes and on the UCSF's steering committee for Women's Precision Medicine.