Charles Rotimi

Charles Nohuoma Rotimi (born 1957) is the Scientific Director of the National Human Genome Research Institute (NHGRI).

He joined the National Institutes of Health (NIH) in 2008 as the inaugural Director of the Trans-NIH Center for Research in Genomics and Global Health and was also the chief of the NHGRI's Metabolic, Cardiovascular, and Inflammatory Disease Genomics Branch. He works to ensure that population genetics include genomes from African populations and founded the African Society of Human Genetics in 2003 and was elected its first president. Rotimi was instrumental in the launch of the Human Heredity and Health in Africa (H3Africa) with the NIH and the Wellcome Trust. He was elected to the National Academy of Medicine in 2018.

Early life and education

Rotimi was born in Benin City, Nigeria, and is the second oldest of six children. His mother had no education and his father was a high school English teacher. He led the chemistry lab at a high school in Benin. He was appointed as an epidemiologist at Loyola University Chicago, where he worked on cardiovascular disease and obesity in people in the African diaspora. He compiled genomic data from 6,000 people in 13 language families, identifying 21 global genetic ancestries. In an interview with The Lancet, Rotimi described inequality as "one of the most outrageous aspects of society". He began to work with Kári Stefánsson in 2007, studying the diabetes risk variant TCF7L2 in West African populations. He demonstrated that both TCF7L2 and its genetic variant HapA increase the risk of diabetes due to their function in energy metabolism. To determine the origins of the sickle cell disease mutation, Rotimi studied the genomes of 3,000 people. He works with Francis Collins on making genomic studies more inclusive. He launched the Human Heredity and Health in Africa (H3Africa) initiative with the African Society of Human Genetics, a $70 million collaboration between the National Institutes of Health and Wellcome Trust. He described the project as a "lifetime achievement". He serves on the editorial boards of Public Health Genomics, Genome Medicine, Clinical Genetics and the Journal of Applied and Translational Genomics.