An expert on maternal fetal medicine and prenatal screening, Dr. Clifton is involved in study design, management and statistical data analysis on clinical studies. She has been with the GWU Biostatistics Center since 1997, rising from a research assistant to a research scientist prior to accepting a faculty appointment at SPHHS. Her doctoral dissertation was on optimizing a first-trimester predictive model for Down syndrome. Dr. Clifton is an epidemiologist on the Maternal Fetal Medicine Units (MFMU) Network. Two studies she has directed are a multi-center, randomized clinical trial of 10,000 women to determine whether treatment with antioxidants will reduce the complications associated with pregnancy related hypertension and an observational cohort study of 2,400 women that will evaluate biophysical and biochemical markers in their ability to predict preeclampsia. She was also a statistician for a multi-center randomized trial to determine whether pharmaceutical therapy delays or prevents the clinical progression of benign prostatic hyperplasia.