Rafael Contreras-Galindo, P.I

Rafael completed his ph.D in Biomedical Sciences in Ponce School of Health Sciences in Puerto Rico. . Rafael’s first research focused on investigating the expression and replication of Human Endogenous Retroviruses. He completed a post-doctoral fellowship in the lab of David Markovitz at the University of Michigan where the focus was endogenous retroviruses and cancer biology. He discovered thousands of endogenous retroviral sequences in the centromeres and start using them as markers to study centromere biology. Rafael is originally from Bogota, Colombia, and has a research interest in investigating the repetitive regions in the human genome. Besides his native Spanish, Rafael studied German, and enjoys fishing, hiking, cooking, and traveling