Serena started her role as the Health Data Research UK (HDR UK) Scotland Research Manager and Applied Analytics Research Manager in June 2021.

She is also the HDR UK Training Lead for Scotland.

In July 2018 Serena joined the Usher Institute at the University of Edinburgh. Serena manages projects within the Centre for Medical Informatics portfolio, including a number of prestigious, high profile programmes and interdisciplinary grants in health data science. Serena is responsible for ensuring timely set up and completion of projects, including planning, agreeing and monitoring all project deliverables, identifying and resolving all project risks and issues, and reporting progress versus plan and budget targets.

In November 2016 Serena joined as Research Fellow the National Institute for Health Research (NIHR) Evaluation, Trials and Studies Coordinating Centre (NETSCC), based at the University of Southampton to identify new research questions within the Health Technology Assessment (HTA) Programme.

Serena worked as Research Fellow in Microbial Epidemiology and Respiratory Infections in the Faculty of Medicine at the University of Southampton. She joined Southampton in September 2015 to provide support for the Newton Fund Institutional Links project in collaboration with the University of Southampton Malaysia Campus and several Malaysian universities. Through this work, the research community and the Malaysia Ministry of Health gained data on the potential emergence of new microbial strains, the serotype epidemiology of vaccine-preventable respiratory infections and prevalence of antibiotic resistance.

In 2013, she completed her PhD in Animal Biology from the University of Milan, Italy.