Paige was honored with an Honorary Doctor of Philosophy from Global Oved Dei Seminary University. A small crowd gathered as he stepped from the car, wearing a cobalt-blue safari suit and carrying a folder filled with papers. and its Licensors He was born in Orangeburg, SC to Johnnie Lee Walker, father and Jessie Dorman Walker, mother. Anthropologists pored over the caskets, finding signs of ancient African rituals in the toys and tools buried with the dead, the coins placed in their hands. "I was always the only black kid in the class. 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]. Dr. Kittles went to Howard University in 1998 and helped to establish a national cooperative network to study the genetics of . His work on tracing the genetic ancestry of African Americans has brought to focus many issues, new and old, which relate to race, ancestry, identity, and group membership. Now for the first time in three centuries, Gates says, we can begin to reverse the Middle Passage. In 2006 he featured African Ancestry in African American Lives, a PBS documentary on black Americanssearch for their roots. African descent having helped more than 1,000,000 people re-connect with the roots of their family tree. Rick Antonius Kittles (born in Sylvania, Georgia, United States) is an American biologist specializing in human genetics. Sociologist He also investigated interactions between melanin and prescription drugs, and between melanin and illicit drugs such as cocaine. "Other times I would make stuff up and say, 'I'm a Mandingo.' It was while doing this work that Kittles and his associates had a brainstorm. In February 2008 he appeared in part 4 of "African American Lives 2". To overcome that wall is more empowering than I can describe., Kittless criticsand there are manyworry that hes promising too much too fast. Contemporary Black Biography. Kittles launched African Ancestry in February 2003 with Paige, a Washington, D.C., entrepreneur who, as president, oversees the company's marketing and finances. In his biomedical research, Kittles often confronts the puzzle of race; too many studies rely on imprecise thinking. On this Wikipedia the language links are at the top of the page across from the article title. Kittles attended the Rochester Institute of Technology in upstate New York as an undergraduate, earning a biology degree there in 1989. It was seasonably hot85 degrees or soand the streets were muddy. African Ancestry is committed to providing a unique service to the black community by working daily Kittles ran into trouble with the government funders who had underwritten the African Burial Ground research as he moved toward profit-making enterprises, and he parted ways with his former associate Michael Blakey in a disagreement over the new project's aims. MEDIA RESOURCE: Paige has been featured in hundreds of media outlets including The Breakfast Club, Hot 97-FM, Time Magazine, USA Today, 60 Minutes, NewsOne Now with Roland Martin, HuffPost Live with Marc Lamont Hill, The Joe Madison Show, Sister Circle Live, Essence Magazine, The New York Times, The Tom Joyner Morning Show, FOX Business News, Reuters, New York Times, Canal Media Company, Black Enterprise, Ebony, NPR, Metro Source Urban Radio, American Urban Radio Networks, The Grio.com and TheRoot.com among many others. 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 25,000 samples hes collected represent 389 ethnic groups from more than 30 countries, most in west and central Africa, where the slave trade was concentrated. He then helped establish the National Human Genome Center at Howard University. He is also Associate Director of Health Equities of COH Comprehensive Cancer Center. 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. Rick Antonius Kittles (born in Sylvania, Georgia, United States ) is an American biologist specializing in human genetics. Associate Professor, The University of Chicago, Department of Medicine Kittles received his Ph.D. in Biological Sciences from George Washington University. Most Temne, his guide told him, live in the area around Lunsar, along the wide Rokel River 70 miles upstream from the Atlantic coast. He served in these positions until 2004. In the age of DNA screening, centuries-old rumors about plantation owners siring children with their female slaves have become, he says, verifiable fact. It aired in February 2006, and included research into the ancestral lineages of nine prominent African Americans: Gates, Whoopi Wikipedia. Now it contains more than 25,000 and counting. Want this question answered? Petition to nominate Dr. Rick Kittles, geneticist, for the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine. Many African-Americans can relate. Kittles faced a public-relations problem of long standing in his new post, for the AAHPC Study Network was a government-funded project. Kittles was raised in Central Islip, New York. 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. Be notified when an answer is posted. Rick holds a B.S. Then she learned other companies traced it elsewhere, to Senegal and Ivory Coast. "Rick A. Kittles," Ohio State University Medical School, http://cancergenetics.med.ohio-state.edu/2749.cfm (March 1, 2005). Dr. Kittles has published more than 240 research articles in addition to winning numerous awards and accolades. Previous to Ricky's current city of Pasadena, CA, Ricky Kittles lived in Tucson AZ. Kittles discusses why using race in biomedical studies is problematic using examples from U.S. groups which transcend "racial" boundaries and bear the burden of health disparities. 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. 2021 African Ancestry, Inc. All rights reserved. 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. to improve the cultural, emotional, physical, spiritual and economic wellbeing of people across the African Diaspora. That variation is located within a gene that plays a role in DNA repair, and a malfunction in that process could contribute to cancer development. Most clients, though, come to Kittles knowing little about their African forebears and expecting nothing in particular. [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. in Sylvania, Georgia, in an area his family had inhabited for several generations, but he grew up in Central Islip, New York, on Long Island outside of New York City. People are riveted by the possibility that they can find the tribe theyre descended from, says Harvard University African Americanstudies professor Henry Louis Gates Jr., but the Middle Passage prevented us from really finding out. Between the western shore of Africa and the eastern shore of America, names, identities, and religions vanished. Most online reference entries and articles do not have page numbers. Customers, who were often able to put Kittles's results together with bits of family oral history to fill in blanks in their family trees, had strong emotional responses to what they learned from African Ancestry's tests. In fact, African Ancestry has always been a sideline; Kittless scholarly work investigates geneticsrole in diseases like prostate cancer and diabetes, which disproportionately strike African Americans. For African Americans, its hard to make that African connection, says Reverend Sampson. Moreover, a third of paternal-lineage tests Waldo Johnson, associate professor at the School of Social Service Administration and director of the Universitys Center for the Study of Race, Politics, and Culture, disagrees. *Kittles, Ricky Antonius (1998). 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. Journal of Black Studies 1995 26: 1, 36-61 Download Citation. To many of them, what Kittles offers isnt merely scientific information, its a missing fragment of identity. window.__mirage2 = {petok:"0Ev87EeWO4E_u.VbiRlJhxTuEeIgHupvKirG_G1EQrI-86400-0"}; In the early 1990s he began his career as a teacher in several New York and Washington, D.C. area high schools. Scientific observers questioned whether Kittles could generate useful results in view of the fact that DNA testing could illuminate only a small sliver of a person's ancestry, and questions were raised about the size of the African DNA database on which he planned to rely. For 85 percent of African Ancestrys clients, Kittles says, he finds an identical match to an ethnic group in his database, and he tells clients the present-day country or countries where that group resides. When you look at our family history, what gets reinforced is that we were enslaved, he says. Share to Twitter. Education: Rochester Institute of Technology, Rochester, NY, BS, biology, 1989; George Washington University, PhD, biological sciences, 1998. in Sylvania, Georgia, in an area his family had inhabited for several generations, but he grew up in Central Islip, New York, on Long Island outside of New York City. 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. Ricky Kittles is 56 years old today because Ricky's birthday is on 03/16/1966. Already, he had tried out his ancestry tests on a few subjects, among them his parents. Genetics can help us have a more nuanced understanding of how we use that word, not just in the biologial sciences, but in the social sciences and humanities, he says.