Galatea bio

For the past 15 years, Carlos Bustamante has led a multidisciplinary team working on problems at the interface of computational and biological sciences. Much of his research has focused on genomics technology and its application in medicine, agriculture, and evolutionary biology. There, much of his work focused on population genetics and agricultural genomics motivated by a desire to improve the foods we eat and the lives of the animals upon which we depend.

Carlos bustamante lab

He moved to Stanford in , to focus on enabling clinical and medical genomics on a global scale. Taken together, this work has empowered decision-makers to utilize genomics and data science in the service of improving human health and wellbeing. Bustamante also has a strong interest in building new academic units, non-profits, and companies.

He serves as an advisor to the US federal government, private companies, startups, and non-profits in the areas of computational genomics, population and medical genetics, and veterinary and plant genomics. This has had a tremendous impact on how I view the world, and what I have ended up doing as a career. My dad and grandfather were both physicians, and I started out wanting to be a physician.

I became fascinated with how we might be able to use genetics to understand complex diseases and develop tailored approaches to both how we diagnose and treat disease, and, more specifically, how we prevent disease in the first place. This work was very much inspired by what I saw growing up in Venezuela and in the US, and particularly in Miami: that we vary tremendously from person to person, and that the notion that the cause of diabetes, for example, might be the same in me and in you is a bit of a crazy assumption.

How do we begin to tackle and understand the individual contributors that may be our genetics, our personal history, or our environment in these very complicated and important health problems that we face as a country and as an individual community? So, my goal has been to build really diverse research teams that bring together mathematicians, doctors, anthropologists, geneticists—whoever is interested in the problem—to come together in a multi-disciplinary framework and take these challenges on.

It has been extraordinarily rewarding, whether I was doing this as a graduate student or a young Assistant Professor in the colds of Ithaca, New York, or, now, as a senior faculty member at Stanford. Truly, all of the success has come from having been able to build and sustain research communities that are driven and motivated by tackling really important scientific problems.