Dr. Rick Kittles: Biologist, Specializes in Human Genetics, AfricanAncestry.com

Posted on 05. Feb, 2010 by Leshell Hatley in Biology, Job Search, Scholarly Celebrations

Rick Antonius Kittles is an African-American biologist specializing in human genetics. He is the Scientific Director of AfricanAncestry.com, and achieved renown in the 1990s for his pioneering work in tracing the ancestry of African Americans via DNA testing.

Education

He grew up in Central Islip, New York. He holds a B.S. degree in biology from the Rochester Institute of Technology (1989), an M.S. degree in biology from the State University of New York at Brockport (1991) and a Ph.D. in biology from George Washington University in Washington, D.C. (1998).

Career

In the early 1990s he began his career as a teacher in several New York and Washington, D.C. area high schools. From approximately 1997 until 1999, as a researcher with the New York African Burial Ground Project (NYABGP), a federally funded project in New York City, in which Howard University researchers, led by anthropologist Michael Blakey, exhumed the remains of 408 African Americans from an 18th-century graveyard; Kittles gathered DNA samples from the remains and compared them with samples from a DNA database to determine from where in Africa the individuals buried in the graveyard had come.

Beginning in 1998, as he was completing his Ph.D. at George Washington University, Kittles was hired as an assistant professor of microbiology at Howard University in Washington, D.C., and also named director of the African American Hereditary Prostate Cancer (AAHPC) Study Network at the university’s National Human Genome Center. Kittles also co-directed the molecular genetics unit of Howard University’s National Human Genome Center. He served in these positions until 2004. Beginning in 2004, he served as an associate professor in the Department of Molecular Virology, Immunology & Medical Genetics at the Tzagournis Medical Research Facility of Ohio State University in Columbus, Ohio.

He is currently Scientific Director of the Washington, D.C.-based African Ancestry Inc., a genetic testing service for determining individuals’ African ancestry, which he co-founded with Gina Paige in March 2003. He also serves as an associate professor in the Section of Genetic Medicine of the Department of Medicine at the University of Chicago.

He was featured in the BBC Two films Motherland: A Genetic Journey and Motherland – Moving On (released in 2003 and 2004, respectively), as well as in part 4 of the 2006 PBS series African American Lives (hosted by Henry Louis Gates). On October 7, 2007 he was featured on the American TV newsmagazine 60 Minutes. In February 2008 he appeared in part 4 of African American Lives 2.

He has published on the prostate cancer genetics of African Americans.

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Information courtesy of wikipedia.

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