He is currently chief executive officer of Galatea Bio, Inc., a company he founded when a professor at Stanford University School of Medicine.
From 2002 to 2009, Bustamante was a faculty member at Cornell University, publishing numerous works during this time.
For his contributions to population genetics he was awarded, in 2010, a MacArthur Fellowship grant, for "mining DNA sequence data to address fundamental questions about the mechanisms of evolution, the complex origins of human genetic diversity, and patterns of population migration.
"[1] In 2013, Bustamante found a link between the most recent common ancestor for both males and females in Homo sapiens.
[4] In 2018, Bustamante carried out DNA testing of United States Senator Elizabeth Warren that concluded that "the vast majority" of Warren's ancestry is European, but that "the results strongly support the existence of an unadmixed Native American ancestor six to ten generations ago.