biology

Rick Kittles

Rick Kittles is a biology topic covered in the lgStudy science library. This page brings together a partial reference excerpt, illustrations, worked examples, real-world applications and a short study plan, so you can understand Rick Kittles rather than just read about it. In short: 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. 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.

Key takeaways

Rick Kittles belongs to biology; place it in that map before memorising details.
Learn the definition first, then one example that makes the definition concrete.
Connect Rick Kittles to a quantity you can measure, compute or draw — that is where exam questions come from.
Reproduce the core statement of Rick Kittles from memory before moving on to harder problems.

Reference excerpt

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. 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. He has previously held positions at Howard University (1998–2004), Ohio State University (2004–2006), the University of Chicago (2006–2010), the University of Illinois Chicago (2010–2014), the University of Arizona (2014–2017), and the City of Hope National Medical Center (2017–2022).

Biography Kittles was raised in Central Islip, New York. Rick holds a B.S. degree in biology from the Rochester Institute of Technology (1989), where he pledged Kappa Alpha Psi fraternity, and a Ph.D. in biology from George Washington University in Washington, D.C. (1998). In 1990 he began his career as a teacher in several New York and Washington, D.C. area high schools. From approximately 1995 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 the leader 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 February 2003. 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. 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 genetic variation and prostate cancer genetics of African Americans. In addition, he discovered, through a DNA analysis, he descends mainly of people of Dakar, Senegal, and Nigeria's Hausa people.

Scientific contributions Kittles was one of the earliest geneticists to trace the ancestry of Africans through DNA testing. This led him to co-found the company African Ancestry Inc., which set out to be the leading advocate for tracing the ancestry of individuals with African descent. Kittles is known for his work on prostate cancer but he devotes part of his time to study and research other diseases such as colon and breast cancer, sickle cell anemia, red blood cell immune response, and pulmonary hypertension. Kittles has been an advocate for studying prostate cancer among African Americans for much of his scientific career; his primary concern however, was to find out how genes and the environment increased the risk of prostate cancer. 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. Kittles has also been a part of many cutting edge developments including the progress of genetic markers and how an individual's ancestry can be used to help identify risk of disease and health outcomes. More recently, Kittles and his team have been conducting genetic sequencing trials to try and find variations in genes that affect a person's response to drugs.

Publications Kittles, Ricky Antonius (1998). "The Finnish Population Bottlenecks: Exploiting the Evolutionary History of Genes for Population and Genetic Disease Studies." Ph.D. dissertation. Washington, D.C.: George Washington University. Kittles, Rick, and Charmaine Royal (2003). "The Genetics of African Americans: Implications for Disease Gene Mapping and Identity." In Genetic Nature/Culture: Anthropology and Science Beyond the Two-Culture Divide, ed. Alan H. Goodman, Deborah Heath, and M. Susan Lindee (Papers presented at a Wenner-Gren Foundation international symposium, held June 11–19, 1999 in Teresopolis, Brazil). Berkeley, California: University of California Press, pp. 219–233. ISBN 0-520-23792-7. ISBN 0-520-23793-5.

Illustrations

Worked examples

Example 1 — a first encounter with Rick Kittles

Start with the simplest possible case. Write down what Rick Kittles claims or describes in one sentence, then invent the smallest concrete situation in which that sentence is true. In biology, the smallest case is usually a single object, a single equation or a single measurement. Check that every symbol or term in your sentence has a meaning in that case.

Example 2 — changing one variable

Take the situation from Example 1 and change exactly one quantity: double it, halve it, or set it to zero. Predict what should happen to Rick Kittles before you calculate. Comparing your prediction with the result is the fastest way to find out whether you understand the idea or only the words.

Example 3 — an exam-style question

Typical questions about Rick Kittles ask you to (a) state it precisely, (b) apply it to given data, and (c) explain a limitation. Practise writing all three answers in under five minutes; the third part is what separates a full-mark answer from an average one.

Applications of Rick Kittles

In research: Rick Kittles appears in biology research whenever the underlying quantities have to be modelled precisely. Papers usually cite it as a starting assumption and then explore where it breaks down.
In technology and industry: Engineering practice reuses Rick Kittles in design rules, simulations and safety margins. Knowing the idea lets you read a specification sheet and understand why the numbers look the way they do.
In the classroom: Rick Kittles is common in secondary-school and first-year university syllabi. It links to neighbouring topics 21st-century African-American academics, 21st-century African-American scientists, 21st-century American academics, so understanding it makes those chapters shorter.
In everyday life: Look for Rick Kittles outside the textbook — in sport, cooking, traffic, electronics or the sky above you. An example you found yourself is remembered far longer than one you were given.

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How to study Rick Kittles in 20 minutes

Read the reference excerpt below once, without taking notes.
Close the page and write down what Rick Kittles means in your own words.
Compare your version with the excerpt and mark what you missed.
Work through the three examples above with pen and paper.
Explain Rick Kittles out loud to somebody else — or to Teacher Smith in the lgStudy chat.

Frequently asked questions

What is Rick Kittles in simple terms?

Why does Rick Kittles matter?

Because it connects several biology ideas at once: it gives you a definition you can apply, a quantity you can calculate, and a way to check whether a result is plausible.

How should I study Rick Kittles?

Read the excerpt, restate it from memory, then work through the examples and applications listed on this page. The five-step study plan above takes about twenty minutes.

What does this page cover?

It gives you a compact reference excerpt plus original lgStudy explanations, examples, applications and study material on Rick Kittles.