rick kittles biography

Objective. By this time it was the late 1990s; Kittles earned his PhD in 1998 and took a job as assistant professor of microbiology at Howard University. The way Kittles tells it, requests from African Americans swelled to a roar. He holds a B.S. Kittles had a few fierce critics within the African-American community as well; charging African Americans a fee to learn about their African origins was "like charging Holocaust victims a fee to confirm their relatives were in fact gassed," University of Maryland anthropologist Fatima Jackson told the on-line magazine Salon. Therefore, that information is unavailable for most Encyclopedia.com content. Washington Business Forward, August 2001. Theyve got all these diamonds, but theres so much exploitation., Sampson has read the critical press about Kittless work. "Kittles, Rick Born 1976(?) Six weeks later he got a letter from company president Gina Paige, informing him that his DNA indicated a common ancestry with Sierra Leones Temne tribe. If they could trace the origins of buried African Americans, they could do the same thing with living individuals. Rick Antonius Kittles ( born in Sylvania, Georgia, United States) is an American biologist specializing in human genetics. Controversy continued to dog himan anonymous letter was submitted to Ohio State's search committee, accusing him of blurring scientific and for-profit workbut it was his strong record as a prostate cancer researcher, not his work with African Ancestry, that interested his new employer. Then he adds, I know that if I wasnt who I was in that little village of Lunsar, they wouldnt have given me no name.. "Milestones Leading to the NHGC," National Human Genome Center, www.genomecenter.howard.edu/milestones.htm (March 1, 2005). He played college football at Iowa, and was drafted by the 49ers in the fifth round of the 2017 NFL Draft. (February 23, 2023). Encyclopedia.com gives you the ability to cite reference entries and articles according to common styles from the Modern Language Association (MLA), The Chicago Manual of Style, and the American Psychological Association (APA). He showed them the paperwork hed gotten from African Ancestry, the certificate attesting to his Temne lineage. Paige has served as speaker, presenter and/or partner to McDonalds, Capital One, The Walt Disney Company, Booz Allen Hamilton, Wells Fargo, The Wall Street Health Forum, New York Times Travel Show, United Healthcare and dozens of community organizations and faith-based entities. His company, African Ancestry, Inc., used his expertise in genetic testing to put African Americans, from celebrities to ordinary genealogy buffs, in touch with their roots in a way that Americans of European descent took for granted but that a displaced and enslaved people had mostly only dreamed of. In 2006 he took African Ancestrys Y-chromosome test and was told his DNA matched with Nigerias Ibo people. He also served as Co-Director of Molecular Genetics in the National Human Genome Center at Howard University. African Ancestry determines specific countries and "Kittles, Rick Oral history traced the family from New York, where Kittles grew up, to Georgia, where he was born and his grandparents lived. [http://saxakali.com/Saxakali Wikipedia, Race (classification of human beings) The term race or racial group usually refers to the concept of categorizing humans into populations or groups on the basis of various sets of characteristics. Associate Professor, The University of Chicago, Department of Medicine Kittles received his Ph.D. in Biological Sciences from George Washington University. Rick holds a B.S. Therefore, be sure to refer to those guidelines when editing your bibliography or works cited list. In 2003, Dr. Kittles and along with Co-founder Dr. Gina Paige pioneered a new marketplace for Black people looking to know where theyre from in Africa. His company, African Ancestry, Inc., used his expertise in genetic testing to put African Americans, from celebrities to ordinary genealogy buffs, in touch with their roots in a way that Americans of European descent took for granted but that a displaced and enslaved people had mostly only dreamed of. "Rick A. Kittles," Ohio State University Medical School, http://cancergenetics.med.ohio-state.edu/2749.cfm (March 1, 2005). Its important to have a historical place of origin, he says, and Africa is a huge continentmuch larger than the U.S. Feb 25 2023. Currently, he is Professor and Founding Director of the Division of Health Equities within the Department of Population Sciences at City of Hope. EDUCATION: Paige resides in Washington, D.C. and holds a degree in Economics from Stanford University and an MBA from the University of Michigan Ross School of Business. City of Hope's translational research and personalized treatment protocols. As an Assistant Professor at Howard University in 1997, Dr. Kittles helped establish a national cooperative network to study the genetics of hereditary prostate cancer in African Americans. Kittles offered his customers a glimpse into their specific African ancestries, pinpointing an actual African ethnic group to which one or two of the customer's ancestors had belonged. His collection of 10,000 samples "to me sounds pretty good," University of Chicago professor Chung-I Wu told the Chicago Tribune (as quoted by the Knight Ridder Tribune News Service). Customers could choose to have either the paternal line (though the Y chromosome, the genetic marker responsible for the development of male characteristics) or the maternal line (through mitochondrial DNA) investigated; a discount was available for the pair. Add an answer. On December 15, 2010, the Center for Genetic Medicine and Science in Society, the University's office for science outreach and public engagement, hosted th. Kittles also starred opposite Josh Holloway and Sarah Wayne Callies in the action-drama series, "Colony", and was seen in Dee Rees' HBO Emmy-winning film, "Bessie", with Queen Latifah. Dr. Kittles is an international leader on race and genetics, health disparities, and cancer genetics. Like many African Americans, we knew nothing about where in Africa our ancestors were from, he says. "The Finnish Population Bottlenecks: Exploiting the Evolutionary History of Genes for Population and Genetic Disease Studies." On this Wikipedia the language links are at the top of the page across from the article title. He is of African American ancestry, and achieved renown in the 1990s for his pioneering work in tracing the ancestry of African Americans via DNA testing. Any genealogy researcher, however, knows that filling in one piece of an ancestry puzzle can shed light on many other parts of the puzzle. Founded in 2003 by Dr. Rick Kittles and Gina Paige, African Ancestry is the world leader in tracing maternal and paternal lineages of SUBJECT MATTER EXPERT: Dr. Kittles work at African Ancestry has ignited global interest and dialogue, as well as unprecedented focus on African ancestry tracing in U.S. and abroad. Now it contains more than 25,000 and counting. PIONEERING RESEARCHER: Dr. Rick Kittles is Co-founder and Scientific Director of African Ancestry, Inc. When he was hired by Ohio State in 2004, the Columbus Dispatch reported that he would bring to the university more than $1 million in research grants in addition to his teaching expertise. Already, he had tried out his ancestry tests on a few subjects, among them his parents. Johnson concurs, adding that DNA reveals the limitations of the very idea of race. Kittles and his associates hoped that a project carried out mostly by African American researchers might break down these walls of mistrust. He also serves as an associate professor in the Department of Medicine and the Division of Epidemiology and Biostatistics at the University of Illinois, Chicago.[8]. For the book, see Afrocentricity (book) Wikipedia, Historical definitions of race The historical definition of race was an immutable and distinct type or species, sharing distinct racial characteristics such as constitution, temperament, and mental abilities. In 2000, Harvard University Prof. Henry Louis Gates Jr. sent his DNA to Rick Kittles, a geneticist at Howard University, to trace his ancestry.Dr. Dr. Kittles research interests explore DNA, family history, and disease. Its like your last name, he says. 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. Afrocentrism has a long and often misunderstood history. UA researcher Rick Kittles is a national leader on health disparities and the role of genes and environment in disease. Geneticist Rick Kittles, a professor at Ohio State University, became one of the hottest young scientific researchers in the country in the early 2000s. Counting backward 350 years, or about 14 generations, to the height of the African slave trade, any one person could have as many as 16,384 ancestors. Recognize how and why race is a social and political construct and its current function in society. The Global African Community. September 2, 2007. For African Americans, its hard to make that African connection, says Reverend Sampson. He taught biology at the high school level in the New York and Washington areas for several years, winning admission to the graduate biology program at George Washington University in Washington, D.C. As a graduate student, Kittles did research on melanin, the pigment that darkens human skin and protects it from solar radiation; Africans and other equatorial peoples frequently exposed to the sun have higher levels of melanin than do humans of European descent. It was while doing this work that Kittles and his associates had a brainstorm. His work has been featured on BBC, PBS, CNN, CBS 60 Minutes, Ebony, NPR and USA TODAY, as well as hundreds of local and trade media across the world. Says Sampson: That resonated., At first sight, Lunsars cinderblock shacks and dirt roads reminded Sampson of the rural Southern towns hed seen as a civil-rights organizer during the 1960sthe kind of place where townspeople gather around a single television in the main store. . Dr. The test was simple and painlessthe customer took a cell sample from the inside of the cheek with a swaband could be handled entirely by mail, with a guarantee of confidentiality. Van Velsen | 1 Stefanie Van Velsen Feb 21, 2019. He is also Associate Director of health equities in the Comprehensive Cancer Center. He took on a partner, Washington businesswoman Gina Paige, to handle the financial side of African Ancestry, taking the title of Scientific Director for himself. I said, I have to reclaim what was taken away from me. Sampson told them he was like a tree from their forest that had been uprooted and stolen. Just click the "Edit page" button at the bottom of the page or learn more in the Biography submission guide. DNA MATCHMAKER: A leading geneticist, Dr. Kittles oversees AfricanAncestry.coms DNA matching and results function. He then helped. His published papers, most of them (as is typical in the hard sciences) done in collaboration with other investigators, bore lengthy titles like "High Incidence of Microsatellite Instability in Colorectal Cancer from African Americans." Filmmaker Spike Lee, former United Nations ambassador Andrew Young, and actors LeVar Burton and Vanessa Williams were three of African Ancestry's celebrity clients, while over 2,000 others paid about $300 or $350 for the company's DNA tests in its first year in business. "I would say, 'Africa'" when other students asked him about his own roots, Kittles was quoted as saying in the Seattle Times. Wiki User. Study guides. Kittles also co-directed the molecular genetics unit of Howard University's National Human Genome Center. But there the trail ended. That DNA flows through the entire family, Sampson says. If you need immediate assistance, call 877-SSRNHelp (877 777 6435) in the United States, or +1 212 448 2500 outside of the United States, 8:30AM to 6:00PM U.S. Eastern, Monday - Friday. So when Rick Kittles, a young and ambitious geneticist at Howard University, proposed using DNA testing to pinpoint the exact region or tribe of their forebears, hundreds of African Americans . In his biomedical research, Kittles often confronts the puzzle of race; too many studies rely on imprecise thinking. He was looking for prominent African Americans to be guinea pigs, and unbeknownst to him, I had been interested more than interested, obsessed with my own family tree since I was 9 years old. Some of the research followed traditional anthropological models: caskets were examined in search of links to traditional African practices, and the scientists learned what they could from dry bones about how these enslaved African Americans had spent their working life. The whole countryside, he says, is basically without electricity. There was so much variation, and I realized we could tell something about maternal ancestry by looking at this data, he says. It is through his years of research on genetic variation and his passion for the movements of African people throughout the world that AfricanAncestry.com was conceived. It made news in London and Sydney. ENTREPRENEURIAL DNA: From a lineage of entrepreneurs, Paige launched her first business at age 8, with a magazine purposed to raise money for an amusement park visit. Reverend Al Sampson arrived in Lunsar, Sierra Leone, on a sunny December day in 2005. Rick Kittles. Founded in 1913, City of Hope is a leader in bone marrow transplantation and immunotherapy such as CAR T cell therapy. 1998. Some buildings had thatched roofs, and many local businesses were simply candlelit kiosks. Giving occasional public lectures about melanin, Kittles speculated that high levels of the chemical in the inner ear might account for what some considered a heightened sensitivity to music and rhythm among humans of African descent. That bothered me, not knowing more about where in Africa.". One of the components that shapes identity, Kittles says, is family history, and for African Americans theres a void. As a second-year graduate student in biology at George Washington University, he began collecting data on mitochondrial DNA, the maternally inherited part of the genome, which passes unchanged from generation to generation. A single mitochondrial DNA or Y-chromosome test from African Ancestry costs $350; other companies charge between $200 and $900 for genetic screenings. My seats been vacant. He also asked them for a Temne name. [13], Kittles has performed a large amount of research, including publishing over 160 peer-reviewed articles, over his career with much of this work being devoted to issues such as genetic ancestry and health disparities among African Americans and other minority groups. Its a jump-off point., Some jumps land further than others; African Ancestrys analysis transcends individual families, raising questions about the meaning of race itself. Several thousand ethnic groups exist throughout the continent, sometimes as many as 20 or 30 in a single country, and African Ancestry consults with anthropologists, archaeologists, historians, and linguists to put the data into context and account for the influences that wars or migrations or famines might have had on present-day AfricansDNA. The path that led to the founding of African Ancestry was complicated and not without controversy, but Kittles found that his research often fed into the deep interest in African-American genealogy that had been awakened by the publication of Alex Haley's book Roots in the 1970s. When he was hired by Ohio State in 2004, the Columbus Dispatch reported that he would bring to the university more than $1 million in research grants in addition to his teaching expertise. Many consumers do not realize, the authors wrote, that the tests are probabilistic and can reach incorrect conclusions., Others criticize the expense. 2019Encyclopedia.com | All rights reserved. He was a nationally recognized investigator whose specialties encompassed such vital topics as prostate cancer and the role of genetics in disease. As a pilot project, they began to gather genetic material from Boston-area school children. He has published on genetic variation and prostate cancer genetics of African Americans. Rick Antonius Kittles (born in Sylvania, Georgia, United States) is an American biologist specializing in human genetics and a Senior Vice President for Research at the Morehouse School of Medicine. Kittles does this using tests that examine two components of the genome that remain essentially unchanged from one generation to the next: mitochondrial DNA, a maternally inherited genetic strand found outside the cell nucleus and separate from other genes; and the Y-chromosome, which passes from father to son. He served in these positions until 2004. As he was completing his doctoral degree at George Washington University in 1998, Kittles was hired as an assistant professor of microbiology at Washington's Howard University and was named director of the African American Hereditary Prostate Cancer (AAHPC) Study Network at the university's National Human Genome Center. Kittless tests offer information about only one ancestor per generation. Is understanding your roots as important as a pair of sneakers? Sampson, who established genetics as a ministry within his church and encourages worshippers to test their DNA, advises splitting the cost among several family members. Rick Antonius Kittles was born in 1976(?) Tory Kittles is an American actor, writer, and director who stars opposite Queen Latifah on CBS's hit series The Equalizer. South Africa? Three decades after Roots author Alex Haley followed family lore, slave-ship records, and a few snatches of inherited tribal dialect to Kunta Kinte, a Gambian warrior sold into slavery in 1767, African Americans are unearthing their ancestry in growing numbers. Simply select your manager software from the list below and click on download. It was seasonably hot85 degrees or soand the streets were muddy. Paige was honored with an Honorary Doctor of Philosophy from Global Oved Dei Seminary University. Rick Kittles, PhD, received a BS in biology from the Rochester Institute of Technology in 1989 and a PhD in biological sciences from George Washington University in 1998. Eleven million people watched as celebrities such as Oprah Winfrey, Quincy Jones, and Chris Tucker submitted their DNA for the companys analysis. Some surnames, like Smith or Jackson or Brown, are common. dont lead to Africa at all, but to Europe. However, the date of retrieval is often important. He is of African-American ancestry, and achieved renown in the 1990s for his pioneering work in tracing the ancestry of African Americans via DNA testing. . Sampson booked a flight after a chance meeting with a Sierra Leone native who offered to accompany him there. 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 . Cite this article Pick a style below, and copy the text for your bibliography. [1] He is of African-American ancestry, and achieved renown in the 1990s for his pioneering work in tracing the ancestry of African Americans via DNA testing. But youre not necessarily related to any of them; its just a common name. Other last names are more rare. Then she learned other companies traced it elsewhere, to Senegal and Ivory Coast. Goal for these activities: Recognize why using race in biomedical studies can be problematic. Addresses: Office Department of Molecular Virology, Immunology & Medical Genetics, 690C Tzagournis Medical Research Facility, 420 W. 12th Ave., Columbus, OH 43210. He is also known for appearing in films and TV series like Malibu's Most Wanted (2003), Get Rich or Die Tryin' (2005), Next (2007), Miracle at St. Anna (2008) among others. But Kittles was able to merge anthropology and biology, gathering DNA samples from the remains and comparing them against a growing database of DNA obtained from modern Africans in order to find out where the eighteenth-century African Americans had originally come from. The path that led to the founding of African Ancestry was complicated and not without controversy, but Kittles found that his research often fed into the deep interest in African-American genealogy that had been awakened by the publication of Alex Haley's book Roots in the 1970s. The company was sort of an afterthought, he says. Kittles received a Ph.D. in Biological Sciences from George Washington University. If you look at the data, what were doing is actually deconstructing race, Kittles says. We would like to show you a description here but the site won't allow us. //

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