About

Luca Monticelli is a Research Director at the Institut National de la Recherche Médicale (INSERM) and a Team Leader at the institute of Molecular Microbiology and Structural Biochemistry (MMSB), that is a CNRS institute in Lyon (France).

Luca studied Physical Chemistry at the University of Milan (Italy), and obtained a PhD in Chemistry in 2002 at the University of Padua (Italy), specializing in NMR spectroscopy and computational chemistry. In 2003 he joined the group of Prof. Peter Tieleman at the University of Calgary (Canada), where he focused on molecular modeling of membranes and membrane proteins, in collaboration with the group of Prof Marrink (Univ. Groningen, The Netherlands). In 2008 he joined the group of Prof. Vattulainen at the Dept. of Applied Physics of the Helsinki University of Technology (Finland), where he focused on modeling carbon nanomaterials. In 2009 he obtained a permanent position at INSERM in Paris (France) and continued working on the interaction of synthetic materials with biological systems. In 2013 he moved to the Institute of Molecular Microbiology and Structural Biochemistry (MMSB) in Lyon (France), where he is a group leader since 2015.

Research interests

Research in the group of Dr Monticelli focuses on the dynamics, interactions, and functioning of biological membranes, that envelop and compartmentalize all living cells. Biomembranes are extremely dynamic entities at all levels – in fact the vast majority of them is liquid, in physiologically relevant states, which makes it very challenging to obtain structural information at high resolution with experimental techniques. In the context of biological membranes, the ultimate goal in Luca’s team is to better understand the links between structure, interactions and, ultimately, biological functions at the molecular level.

To this end, Luca uses different molecular simulations tools (including quantum mechanical calculations, classical all-atoms, coarse-grained, and mesoscale Brownian dynamics). The group also develops their own software tools and makes them publicly available via GitHub.

Finally, Luca is one of the early contributors to the Martini coarse-grained force field, that has become very popular both in biological sciences and material sciences.

Working with BioExcel

Luca started his journey in computational biophysics as a GROMACS user back in 2000, and it now remains the main tool used in his research. In perspective, Luca plans to contribute to the integration of software developed in his team with other BioExcel tools, focusing particularly on the implementation and extension of scripts for manipulating Martini coarse-grained structures and trajectories as BioBB building blocks, with the goal of improving usability, interoperability, and performance.

Learn more about the BioExcel Ambassador Program