Episode 111 | Just Genetic Variation
Just Genetic Variation
In episode two of the DNA season, Just Science interviews Dr. Kenneth Kidd, Professor Emeritus of Genetics at Yale University, about his research in genetics. Dr. Kenneth Kidd has been working on grants from the National Institute of Justice for nearly a decade. In that time, he has made great contributions to our understanding of genetics and its use in forensics. While his work started with genetic modeling of various disorders, it quickly expanded to include many sub-disciplines of DNA research. Listen in as he discusses genetic mapping, population genetics, and his research journey in this episode.
For more information on Dr. Kidd’s contributions to forensics, listen to the episode “Just Microhaps Perhaps” in the 2018 NIJ R&D season of Just Science here.
This episode of Just Science is funded by the National Institute of Justice’s Forensic Technology Center of Excellence [Award 2016-MU-BX-K110].
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Kenneth K. Kidd, Ph.D., Professor Emeritus of Genetics and Senior Research Scientist at Yale University, is a human population geneticist. He has published over 550 scientific papers on a variety of subjects before and during his 44-year career at Yale. His research has included medical genetics, gene mapping, database design, pharmacogenetics, and a variety of molecular methodologies. His long-standing interest in human population genetics has been combined with his laboratory’s expertise in molecular technology to examine human genome diversity at the DNA level. In the late 1980’s and early 1990’s his expertise in both population and molecular genetics provided helpful expert testimony in getting DNA accepted in the courts. After serving on the advisory panels for DNA identification of victims of the World Trade Center Attack and of Hurricane Katrina, he began research in his lab on panels of single nucleotide polymorphisms for various uses in forensics as an extension of his active research on human genetic diversity. His lab is now very active in identifying SNPs useful in forensics and in using bioinformatics to make the data available and useful. His group designed and maintains ALFRED, the large ALlele FREquency Database, and is actively enhancing FROGkb, the Forensic Reference/Resource on Genetics knowledge base. Since 2013 he has also been recognized for his development of microhaplotypes as a new type of forensic marker suited for the coming transition from capillary electrophoresis to massively parallel sequencing as a common method in forensic practice.
Additional Resources:
Dr. Kidd’s 2018 NIJ R&D archive presentation recorded at AAFS
The redesigned Forensic Research/Reference on Genetics-knowledge base, FROG-kb