Dr. Rick Kittles (Part 2) Full Episode

Recorded Spring of 2007. Host Dr. Carolyn Bailey Lewis speaks with molecular geneticist Dr. Rick Kittles during his visit to Ohio University - about his work tracing African-American heritages to Africa. Dr. Kittles talks about the use of DNA to trace a person's heritage and how he responds to critics of his work.
Dr. Kittles' research focus is to formally evaluate genetic mechanisms involved in complex diseases. His work entails understanding how genetic variation is structured across human populations and how that variation contributes to inter-individual variation in disease susceptibility and other phenotypes such as drug response and skin color. Currently his work explores sequence variation within candidate genes in well-characterized populations for prostate and breast cancer, cardiovascular disease, and human pigmentation. His interests also include biological and socio-cultural issues related to "Race" and health disparities and the utility of admixture mapping for genes for common traits and disease in African Americans and Hispanic Americans.

From AfricanAncestry.com: Kittles received his Ph.D. in Biological Sciences from George Washington University. Dr. Kittles went to Howard University in 1998 and helped to establish a national cooperative network to study the genetics of hereditary prostate cancer in the African American community. As Co-Director of Molecular Genetics at the National Human Genome Center at Howard University, he established large-scale, high throughput genotyping and DNA sequencing. Dr. Kittles' research exploits gene genealogy in studies of population history and disease associations. He has had a strong research focus on using DNA to trace ancestry of African Americans and has published articles on prostate cancer genetics of African Americans.

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