Rick Kittles

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.

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;[7] 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.

[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.

[14] 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.

[14] 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.