Julio Díaz Berrocoso was born in Plasencia, a town west of Spain, in the region of Extremadura. He earned his Ph. D. from the Animal Science Department of Universidad Politecnica Madrid in 2013. During his studies, he traveled to the United States on several occasions as a visiting scholar. He spent three and a half months at Ohio State under the direction of Dr. Mike Lilburn and four months at Purdue under the direction of Dr. Layi Adeola. Then, he came to the Stein lab at Illinois for three months in 2012 and another three months in 2013.

After finishing his Ph. D., he did a postdoctoral fellowship in the University of Hawaii at Manoa, developing an integrated animal nutrition program, mainly focused on feed evaluation and nutrients metabolism in different animal species. He currently works in poultry feed evaluation at Agrifirm in the Netherlands.