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).
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.

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