Silvia De Monte

Silvia De Monte is a Researcher at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Biology in Plön, Germany, and holds affiliations with the Institute of Biology at École Normale Supérieure in Paris, France. She leads the 'Dynamics of Microbial Collectives' group, focusing on the ecological and evolutionary processes underlying collective behaviors in microbial systems. Her work integrates mathematical modeling with empirical observations to explore how selection pressures shape collective functions in heterogeneous cellular assemblies.

De Monte's research spans multiple areas, including the eco-evolutionary dynamics of aggregative multicellularity, the role of phenotypic heterogeneity in bacterial populations, and the mathematical modeling of species abundance distributions in planktonic communities. She has collaborated with institutions such as the CNRS, ENS Paris, and the University of Vienna, contributing to interdisciplinary projects at the interface of biology, physics, and economics.

Her educational background includes a PhD from the Technical University of Denmark (2004) and postdoctoral training at the University of Vienna and the Max Planck Institute. She has held roles as a Researcher at CNRS (since 2007) and an Attached Lecturer at École Normale Supérieure (2014–2018).

Key research projects include investigating the emergence of Darwinian properties in collective systems, the evolutionary stability of microbial symbioses, and the application of game theory to microbial social dynamics. Her work emphasizes the interplay between microscale cellular interactions and macroscale ecological patterns.