Maria Luisa Ricci is a research manager at the Istituto Superiore di Sanità in Rome, Italy, where she is responsible for the National Reference Laboratory for Legionella and serves as the principal investigator for the Legionella  EU Reference Laboratory (EURL for Public Health in the field of Legionella) partnership. She has been appointed by the Ministry of Health as an expert for the diagnosis, surveillance, and control of Legionella in Italy, as well as  National Focal Point for  Legionnaires’ Disease at ECDC. She is a member of the European Legionnaires’ Disease Surveillance Network (ELDSNET) coordination committee and, for eight years, served as chair and treasurer of the executive committee of the ESCMID Study Group for Legionella Infections (ESGLI).

Her research primarily focuses on Legionella diagnosis, typing, and outbreak investigations. She has also been the principal investigator of comparative studies on Legionella diagnosis in both clinical and environmental samples and has led studies evaluating disinfection treatments for Legionella. Maria Luisa Ricci is co-author of Italian and European guidelines for Legionella prevention and control, co-author of the Manual of Clinical Microbiology (ASM), and has published numerous papers on Legionnaires’ Disease. She was awarded the 2014 ESGLI prize for the best research proposal on microbiome analysis of drinking water systems.