rkittles19@nul.org
Speaker Bio
Rick Kittles, Ph.D., is professor and founding director of the Division of Health Equities within the Department of Population Sciences at the City of Hope (COH) National Medical Center in Duarte, CA. He is also associate director of Health Equities of COH’s Comprehensive Cancer Center. Dr. Kittles is well known for his research of prostate cancer and health disparities among African Americans. For the last 20 years, Dr. Kittles has been at the forefront of the development of ancestry-informative genetic markers, and how genetic ancestry can be quantified and utilized in genomic studies on disease risk and outcomes. His work has shown the impact of genetic variation across populations in pharmacogenomics, biomarker discovery, and disease gene mapping.
Dr. Kittles received a Ph.D. in biological sciences from George Washington University in 1998. His first faculty appointment was at Howard University where he helped establish the National Human Genome Center.
In 2010, Dr. Kittles was named by Ebony magazine as one of “The Ebony Power 100.” In March of 2012, he delivered the keynote address to the United Nations General Assembly marking the “International Day of Remembrance of Victims of Slavery and the Transatlantic Slave Trade.” Recently Dr. Kittles was named by The Huffington Post as one of “50 Iconic Black Trailblazers Who Represent Every State in America.”