Debora Monego
Dr. Debora Monego joined the Max Planck Institute for Polymer Research as a Group Leader in 2025. She completed undergraduate degrees in Physics and Chemistry at the Federal University of Santa Maria (Brazil) and obtained her PhD in Chemistry from the University of Sydney, where she studied ligand-controlled interactions and stability of nanoparticles using molecular simulations. She subsequently worked as a Postdoctoral Research Fellow and Lecturer at Columbia University, investigating collective cellular dynamics and contributing to science education initiatives.
Debora later moved to Germany as a postdoctoral researcher at the Heidelberg Institute for Theoretical Studies and as a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Fellow at the Max Planck Institute for Polymer Research. During this period, she expanded her research toward collagen as a functional protein material, integrating molecular simulations, evolutionary analysis, and computational tool development to study how protein structure and mechanics are shaped across scales.
Research interests
Biological tissues rely on proteins that not only provide structural support but actively sense and respond to mechanical stress. Our research aims to understand how proteins translate mechanical forces into chemical reactivity, structural adaptation, and long-term evolutionary design principles.
Our group focuses on collagen as a model system to investigate mechanochemistry in biological materials. Using multiscale molecular simulations and bioinformatics, we study how crosslinks, post-translational modifications, and sequence evolution regulate collagen’s mechanical stability and stress-induced chemical responses. To enable these investigations, we develop computational frameworks for building and analysing crosslinked collagen fibrils and for predicting the functional consequences of genetic variation.
More broadly, our research seeks to uncover how proteins encode and respond to mechanical stress over evolutionary timescales. By linking mechanics, chemistry, and evolution, we aim to advance the understanding of tissue mechanics and ageing and to inspire the design of biomimetic protein materials.
Find more about our research and updates at our website !
Recent Publications at MPIP: