Brown Foundation “Our Highest Potential” Chair in Cancer Research
School of Medicine
La Creis Kidd, Ph.D., is an assistant professor of pharmacology and toxicology at the University of Louisville School of Medicine and holds the Brown Foundation “Our Highest Potential” Chair in Cancer Research. She is also a member of the Brown Cancer Center and holds an associate appointment in the Department of Epidemiology and Population Health in the School of Public Health and Information Sciences.
The “Our Highest Potential” Chair was created to identify more effective cancer treatments for minority populations, which suffer from disproportionately high rates of many kinds of cancers.
Overall, African Americans are more likely to die from cancer than any other racial or ethnic population, says Kidd, who earned a Ph.D. in toxicology from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1997 and a master’s of public health from the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health in 2001. The death rate from cancer among African American males is 1.4 times higher than that among European Americans; and for females, it is 1.2 times higher.
Kidd’s research focuses on the genetic and environmental determinants of prostate cancer within ethnically diverse populations. Her work in using genetic markers to identify sub-populations that may benefit from prostate cancer drugs also is applicable to other cancers, including lung cancer, which is relatively common among Kentucky residents. She was recently awarded a grant from the National Cancer Institute to pursue this research. Her work is also funded by the Prostate Cancer Foundation and the Brown Cancer Center.
She has written or co-authored 49 publications and local/national abstracts. In the upcoming months, Dr. Kidd intends to submit three articles in high-impact journals, such as Cancer Epidemiology & Biomarkers and Carcinogenesis. These articles will focus on identifying and evaluating genetic predictors of prostate cancer risk among African-American men.
Prior to accepting her position at U of L, Kidd held a fellowship in cancer prevention at the National Cancer Institute.