Originally from Bogota, Colombia, he graduated with a B.S. in Biology from Universidad de los Andes. He completed his graduate studies at Harvard in Organismic and Evolutionary Biology in 2011, working with Arhat Abzhanov on developmental mechanisms underlying beak shape diversity in Darwin’s finches and their close relatives. After completing his PhD. he joined Hopi Hoekstra’s lab at Harvard, where he established a new model species and developed tools for studying the molecular basis of pigment pattern formation in mammals. Dr. Mallarino’s research focuses on understanding the genetic and developmental mechanisms by which form and structure are regulated during vertebrate embryogenesis and elucidating how these processes get modified during evolutionary time to produce phenotypic diversity.