Julio Monti Belmonte
Bio
Dr. Belmonte joined NC State in August 2018 as a Chancellor’s Faculty Excellence Program cluster hire in Modeling the Living Embryo. He obtained his bachelor’s and master’s degrees in physics from Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Sul in Brazil, where he developed a model for collective cell movements during tissue regeneration. During his Ph.D. in biophysics, under the supervision of James Glazier at Indiana University Bloomington, he developed new computational models for the description of epithelial cells and applied them to study a variety of biological processes such as somitogenesis, limb formation and cystogenesis. As a multidisciplinary postdoctoral fellow at the labs of Maria Leptin and François Nédélec at the European Molecular Biology Laboratory, he focused his research in the mechanisms of force production of cytoskeletal networks and their role in developmental processes.
Area(s) of Expertise
Dr. Belmonte research group aim is to understand the physical principles behind cell mechanics and how they give rise to force production and pattern formation. He uses computer simulations to study these processes at both the tissue level, looking at the formation of organs; and at the subcellular level, asking how active cytoskeletal structures generate the forces that ultimately shape all living things.
Publications
- Start small: A model for tissue-wide planar cell polarity without morphogens , PLoS Computational Biology (2026)
- Connectivity and Contraction in Cytoskeletal Networks , bioRxiv (Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory) (2025)
- Highly dynamic mechanical transitions in embryonic cell populations during Drosophila gastrulation , Nature Communications (2025)
- Start Small: A Model for Tissue-wide Planar Cell Polarity without Morphogens , bioRxiv (Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory) (2025)
- Caging of membrane-to-cortex attachment proteins can trigger cellular symmetry breaking , bioRxiv (Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory) (2024)
- Highly dynamic mechanical transitions in embryonic cell populations during Drosophila gastrulation , bioRxiv (Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory) (2024)
- Microtubule competition and cell growth recenter the nucleus after anaphase in fission yeast , bioRxiv (Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory) (2023)
- β-heavy-spectrin stabilizes the constricting contractile ring during cytokinesis , The Journal of Cell Biology (2022)
- A mechanical model of early somite segmentation , iScience (2021)
- Mechanical competition alters the cellular interpretation of an endogenous genetic program , The Journal of Cell Biology (2021)