Biography

Dr. Kevin Pruitt began his formal education at the University of Texas at Austin where he received a B.S. degree in Chemical Engineering (1995).  Afterwards, he pursued post-baccalaureate research training in the biological sciences at Los Alamos National Laboratory with Dr. Babetta Marrone, where his interest in the mysteries of the chromosome first germinated.  At the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, under the direction of Dr. Channing J. Der, Dr. Pruitt earned his Doctorate degree in Pharmacology (2001).  Dr. Pruitt’s interest in epigenetics blossomed during a short stint of postdoctoral training with Howard Hughes investigator Dr. Yi Zhang, also a member of the Lineberger Cancer Center at UNC.  Subsequently, Dr. Pruitt completed postdoctoral training under the direction of Dr. Stephen Baylin at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine in the Department of Oncology (2006).  There, Dr. Pruitt’s interest in cancer epigenetics grew rapidly and culminated in a recent publication selected as a Faculty of 1000 “Must Read”.

Dr. Pruitt has received numerous awards throughout his research career, some of which include the Hoechst-Celanese Corporation Research Scholarship Award, the Graduate School Excellence Award, the Merck-UNCF Graduate Science Research Dissertation Fellowship, and the Eli Lilly AACR Scholar in Training Award.  Of note, Dr. Pruitt was also a National Science Foundation pre-doctoral fellow and an American Cancer Society postdoctoral fellow during his formal training.  Currently, Dr. Pruitt serves as an Ad-hoc reviewer for the journals “Cancer Research” and “Molecular Cancer Research”.  Dr. Pruitt’s long-term research interests include understanding the role of sirtuin proteins in cancer biology and epigenetic silencing, the focus of his research laboratory at the LSU Health Sciences Center in Shreveport.

Research

In recent years, the increasing interest in Sirtuin protein biology has been astounding. The most prominent human family member, SIRT1, has received considerable attention because of its link with human metabolism, aging and cancer. My colleagues and I have shown that SIRT1 plays a key role in the epigenetic silencing of several tumor suppressor genes (TSG) and profoundly influences Wnt/ b -catenin signaling in cancer cells.