Curriculum Vitae
Rafik was born in Colombia and studied Biology at the National University in Bogota. Later he studied at the University of Göttingen, Germany, where he received his Master of Sciences in Molecular Biology in 2011 (IMPRS for Molecular Biology). Between 2011 and 2014, he did his PhD on the evolution of orphan genes and the emergence of new genes at the Department of Evolutionary Genetics with Prof. Dr. Diethard Tautz at the Max Planck Institute in Plön. He continued his research as a postdoc in the same group before he moved to the USA for a postdoc position at Columbia University in New York.