Vito Conte

Vito Conte may be familiar to many, having spent more than four years in Xavier Trepat’s Integrative Cell and Tissue Dynamics group, first as a postdoc and later as a Juan de la Cierva fellow. Vito now is a Ramon y Cajal fellow and leads the Mechanics of Development and Disease group, which will take a new direction as he develops new biophysical tools to quantify the mechanics of cell and tissues in 3D environments.

“With a strong background in studying how cell and tissue mechanics determine structure and function from my time as a postdoc, I want to carry on exploring the physical mechanisms of development and disease in biological organisms” says Vito, who completed his PhD in biomechanical engineering at King’s College London in the group of Prof. Mark Miodownik, now director of the Institute of Making at UCL. “To do this, my group will develop novel tools to carry out in vivo and in vitro mechanical measurements, which we will integrate into 2D and 3D models of the biological organisms being studied.”