Dr Francesca Short is an Associate Investigator working on regulatory networks and environmental survival in bacterial pathogens.

Fran completed her PhD in molecular microbiology at the University of Cambridge, which was followed by a Sir Henry Wellcome Postdoctoral fellowship at the Wellcome Sanger Institute. In 2019, she relocated to Australia to work at Macquarie University with Professor Ian Paulsen. Fran joined Monash University in November 2020 as an ARC DECRA fellow and became a teaching and research academic in 2023. Fran’s research bridges classical molecular microbiology, biochemistry and genomics approaches to build our understanding of how bacterial pathogens adapt and survive, with a particular focus on the regulation of virulence factors, and survival of stresses encountered outside the host, such as disinfectants.