Dr. Burbulis completed his Ph.D. under the direction of Dr. Brenda Winkel investigating the molecular biology of flavonoid biosynthesis in Arabidopsis thaliana at Virginia Tech, Virginia, USA. He completed his postdoctoral fellowship at the Center of Excellence in Genomic Sciences (CEGS) funded by the National Human Genome Research Institute at the Molecular Sciences Institute in Berkeley, California, USA. Before joining Universidad San Sebastián, he was a founding member of Green Pacific Biologicals and an assistant professor in the Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Genetics at the University of Virginia, Virginia, USA. He is currently an Associate Professor at the Faculty of Medicine and Sciences at the Patagonia Campus, Puerto Montt, Chile

Dr. Burbulis teaches introductory classes in Medicine and research. He is also a collaborating member of the Ph.D. program in Cellular Biology and Biomedicine at the Universidad San Sebastián in Santiago

Dr. Burbulis investigates somatic mosaicism in humans. Here, mutations occur in resident stem cells as they replace damaged cells during a healthy lifetime. These mutations eventually create a mosaic of cells in all organs of the body in which each cell contains a unique genomic structure. The abundance of these mutant cells is low during youth but increases with age. Cells containing severe mutational loads differentiate into a senescent state that protects the host from cancers and other malformations. However, senescent cells secrete inflammatory factors that promote diseases of old age. The rate at which senescent cells accumulate is related to the rate of aging