Harmit Malik received a degree in Chemical Engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology. He then completed his PhD at the University of Rochester, working in the lab of Tom Eickbush and studying the evolutionary origins of retrotransposable elements. For his postdoc he joined Steve Henikoff’s lab to work on, amongst others, the evolution of centromeric histones. He started his lab at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center in 2003, where his research focusses on the genetics of evolutionary conflicts.