Meet The Director

Dr. Charles N. Rotimi is the Director of the Center for Research on Genomics and Global Health (CRGGH) and a Senior Investigator in the Inherited Disease Research Branch of the National Human Genome Research Institute, National Institutes of Health (NIH). His research activities have focused on identifying the genetic, social and lifestyle determinants of diseases of major public health importance. He believes that studying diverse human populations is critically important in the global effort to use genomic tools to better understand human evolutionary history, and how this history may inform individual and group susceptibility/resistance to disease and variable response to drugs. To achieve these goals, Dr. Rotimi's lab has established major genetic epidemiology research projects in multiple ethnic groups in the United States, Africa (Nigeria, Ghana, Kenya and Ethiopia) and China. The CRGGH was established to support and expand these global efforts.

Overall, Dr. Rotimi believes that scientific activities operate within the larger context of society and that the junction of society and science has to be managed so as not to trample on the independence required for good scholarly investigation or to alienate members of societies from the scientific process. In this regard, the CRGGH is interested in how scientists document and describe the nonrandom pattern of human genetic variation and its link to disease risks in different populations. For example, how does human genetic variation inform our understanding of self and group identity and differential distribution of diseases? Investigators at the CRGGH are directly involved in these debates and hope to inform the interpretation of human genetic variation within the context of health disparities and group identity.

Dr. Rotimi received his undergraduate education in biochemistry from the University of Benin in Nigeria before immigrating to the United States for further studies. Dr. Rotimi started his education in the United States at the University of Mississippi where he obtained a Master's degree in Health Care Administration. He obtained a second Master's degree and a Doctorate in Epidemiology from the University of Alabama at Birmingham School of Public Health. Prior to coming to the NIH, Dr. Rotimi was the Director of the National Human Genome Center at Howard University. In his continued efforts to include the African community (both public and scientific), Dr. Rotimi provided the leadership for the establishment of the African Society of Human Genetics and is currently serving as its first president.

Excerpts from an interview with Dr. Rotimi (full interview available in the journal Nature Medicine, July 2008 Vol. 14, #7):

What will you be studying at the new center?
The way I see it, the mission is really to see how we can apply genomic tools to understand disease at basic scientific levels and to see how we can use that understanding to shed some light on the issue of health disparity. When you look at two groups, whether in terms of ethnicity, gender or socioeconomics, we ask the question, "Why do you see more disease in one group compared to the other?" That's health disparity.
We focus on studying African-Americans and other African populations, and we do that in the context of what I call the triangular relationship between obesity, hypertension and diabetes. African-Americans have a much higher rate of obesity, and of course that also drives the rate of diabetes, heart disease and other diseases like stroke and hypertension. So right now we have major international projects in these three areas, and we plan to expand our studies to other ethnic groups in the future.

What are some of the challenges of teasing out the influence of genetics from other factors that can lead to health disparities?
I will be the first to admit that for us to truly understand health disparity, we will need to understand the core issues — such as the poor social structures — that drive people toward poor health. When we develop models to test whether a particular gene is going to contribute disproportionally to disease risk within a certain group, we must make sure that we also capture those things in the environment that may be as or even more important than genetic factors.

If there is not such a thing, genetically, as African-American, then what does it mean to belong to this group?
I never look at African-Americans from a genetic point of view as a uniform group. The only definition of African-American that I have that I can consistently defend is that these are descendents of the inhumane slave trade. That's it. And that's a social definition. At the genetic level, I think all bets are off, and the evidence that we continue to acquire shows that we are not studying a uniform group. African-Americans have ancestry from Africa, Europe, North America and Asia, among others. The combinations of these ancestries vary from person to person and from family to family.

Some people have expressed concern that by studying genetics, you may be drawing attention to the least important factors contributing to health disparities. What do you say to your critics?
There are people who are extremely sensitive to hearing "health disparity" and "genomics" in the same sentence. It makes some people very uncomfortable, because people feel very strongly that you may take away from the most serious issues causing health disparities, such as social factors. What I tell them is that genomics is just one piece of the puzzle. It's a small piece of the puzzle. But I think given how genetics underlies our most important health issues, we need to study it. Human diversity at both the genetic and social levels is not an illusion: We need to embrace it; we need to understand it, and, more importantly, we need to interpret it correctly.