Rick Kittles joined City of Hope as professor and founding director of the Division of Health Equities within the Department of Population Sciences. Kittles’ research focuses on understanding the complex issues surrounding race, genetic ancestry and disease, particularly health disparities among different ethnicities.His work focuses on research into prostate cancer and health disparities among African-Americans, a field of study motivated by his grandfather’s late-stage prostate cancer diagnosis and subsequent death while Kittles was in graduate school.“It was just so shocking and quick how it happened,” he recalled. “I had no idea it was such a big issue in the black community.”
Readers of The Cancer Letter and listeners of The Cancer Letter Podcast are familiar with the impact of President Donald Trump’s first nine months in office on the field of oncology. Now, the threats posed to oncology are being brought to the attention of a general audience—Jonathan Mahler, staff writer for The New York Times Magazine, wrote an in-depth article about how the Trump administration’s actions have brought chaos, uncertainty, and damage to the oncology research community.
