Rafael Contreras-galindo PhD

Rafael Contreras-Galindo is an Assistant Professor and leader of the Genome Instability and Chromosome Biology section at The Hormel Institute, University of Minnesota, who began on April 1st, 2019. Rafael received a Ph.D. from Ponce School of Health Sciences in Puerto Rico where he studied in the AIDS Research Program under the direction of Yasuhiro Yamamura. Rafael’s first research focused on investigating the expression and replication of Human Endogenous Retroviruses, repetitive elements that comprise 8% of the human genome. This field was poorly studied at the time with confusing nomenclature of retroviruses and a lack of uniform technology. Rafael discovered endogenous retrovirus viral particles in the blood of HIV patients that can replicate to some extent. 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 started using them as markers to study centromere biology, a repetitive area of the genome that has been hard to annotate and study. Rafael is originally from Bogota, Colombia, and has a research interest in investigating the repetitive regions in the human genome, in particular centromeres and telomeres. He studies how the instability in those areas of the genome affects the function of chromosomes in healthy cells and disease processes.