Shirley Micallef

Shirley’s work lies at the intersection of agriculture and public health, researching plant-bacterial interactions and plant microbiomes to improve food safety, maximize crop nutritional quality and enhance crop resilience to environmental stresses. A microbial ecologist with a background in plant science, Shirley explores how enteric pathogens that compromise food safety interact with vegetable crops, both under controlled conditions and in field studies. More broadly, she also assesses how agricultural practices and environmental conditions affect crop microbiomes and evaluates the potential for plant growth-promoting rhizobacteria to modulate crop nutritional quality, bolster plant resilience to stresses, and restrict enteric pathogen- plant associations.