I was born in Ocaña, a city in the north east of Colombia, and got my Bachelors degree in Biology from the Universidad Nacional de Colombia in Bogotá. Then, with a fellowship from the Max-Planck Research School for Evolutionary Biology (IMPRS), I moved to Plön, Germany, where I did my PhD at the Max-Planck Institute for Evolutionary Biology and the Christian-Albrechts-Universität zu Kiel, under the supervision of Diethard Tautz. Later on, with a Long-Term Postdoctoral Fellowship from the Human Frontiers Science Program (HFSP) I moved to Princeton University in the US where I was a postdoctoral fellow in the Ayroles Lab affiliated to the Ecology and Evolutionary Biology Department and the Lewis-Sigler Institute for Integrative Genomics.

Since February 2022, I lead the Max Planck Research Group on “Evolutionary Genomics of Complex Traits”. We are located in the Friedrich Miescher Laboratory of the Max Planck Society (FML) and the Max Planck Institute for Biology in Tübingen (Germany).