Carlos D. Bustamante is an American population geneticist and academic. He is also an entrepreneur, and chief executive officer of Galatea Bio, Inc., a company he founded as a professor at Stanford University School of Medicine.
Bustamante is a native of Venezuela who immigrated to the United States at age seven. He attended Harvard University, from which he graduated with a bachelor's and later a doctorate in biology, along with an M.S. in statistics. His doctoral (Ph.D.) dissertation title, accepted at Harvard in 2001, was "Maximum Likelihood and Bayesian Methods for Studying Selection Using DNA Sequence Data". His thesis advisor was Daniel L. Hartl, and Richard C. Lewontin and Peter Donnelly were also on his committee.
After completing his Doctoral studies, Bustamante went on to further study at Oxford University, from 2001 to 2002, focusing in mathematical genetics.
From 2002 to 2009, Bustamante was a faculty member at Cornell University, publishing numerous works during this time.
In 2013, Bustamante and coworkers are reported to have found a link between the most recent common ancestor for both males and females in Homo sapiens. He found that there may be a link to the same time period and even the same region for both Y-chromosomal Adam and Mitochondrial Eve. This study rejected the idea that Mitochondrial Eve may have lived well before Y-chromosomal Adam. The study concludes, however, that not all the genetic material comes from these two ancestors and that the two never met and that most of the genome comes from numerous other ancestors.
He has published over 200 works in peer-reviewed journals.
The following are publications by Bustamante and his collaborators that have received attention in various secondary research literatures.
Bustamante was recognized in 2010 with a MacArthur Fellowship, which highlighted his research efforts at "mining DNA sequence data to address fundamental questions about the mechanisms of evolution, the complex origins of human genetic diversity, and patterns of population migration."
Bustamante has said that he does not consider race to be a "meaningful way to characterize people", commenting that, "In a global context there is no model of three, or five, or even 10 human races. There is a broad continuum of genetic variation that is structured, and there are pockets of isolated populations. Three, five, or 10 human races is just not an accurate model; it is far more of a continuum model." He observed, "If I walk from Cape Horn all the way to the top of Finland, every village looks like the village next to it, but at the extremes people are different."
In 2018, Bustamante carried out DNA testing of United States Senator Elizabeth Warren, from which he concluded that "the vast majority" of Warren's ancestry is European, but that "the results strongly support the existence of an unadmixed Native American ancestor six to ten generations ago."