Garcia received his Bachelor of Science in microbiology from the University of Texas at Austin in 1990. He continued his graduate studies at UT-Austin investigating how bacterial viruses deliver their genetic material into their host. After he obtained his PhD in microbiology in 1996, he held a postdoctoral position in the lab of Paul W. Sternberg at the California Institute of Technology, where he studied mechanisms of behavior and development in the nematode Caenorhabditis elegans. In 2002, he joined the Department of Biology at Texas A&M University. In the fall of 2008, he was appointed as a Howard Hughes Investigator and became a joint faculty member in the Department of Molecular and Cellular Medicine.