Featured Faculty
Elizabeth Ruder
College of Health Sciences and Technology
Liz Ruder completed her doctoral training at Penn State University before joining the Cancer Prevention Fellowship Program at the National Cancer Institute (NCI), National Institutes of Health (NIH) and completing a Master’s in Public Health (MPH) from the Johns Hopkins School of Public Health. She served on the faculty in the School of Health and Rehabilitation Sciences at the University of Pittsburgh prior to joining the RIT faculty in Fall 2015.
Dr. Ruder and her collaborators are interested in the development and evaluation of education tools and programs to translate diet-disease research into useful nutrition education and behavioral modification. A key part of this work has been the development and testing of valid and reliable instruments to measure eating and nutrition related behavior. Dr. Ruder’s work on the evaluation of the NEEDs for Tots curriculum, an early childhood education curriculum designed to disseminate a framework to support feeding relationships congruent with healthy growth and development known as the Satter Division of Responsibility (sDOR) in feeding. Relatedly, Dr. Ruder’s work involves the testing and validation of measures to assess how parents and caregivers feed children ages 2-5 years. Another recent area of her scholarship includes validation of measures of in-home fruit and vegetable availability and parent modeling of positive eating behaviors with targeted measures of parental diet quality.
Dr. Ruder’s research interweaves scholarship with community based organizations, including the teaching and training of health professions students. She is currently the Principal Investigator on a 3-year award from the NYS Department of Health to to enhance the clarity, respect, and motivational skills of physician assistants treating breast cancer survivors. A focus of the award to is to collaborate with the Breast Cancer Coalition of Rochester (BCCR) to train RIT physician assistant students in cultural humility and motivational interviewing, a collaborative, goal-oriented communication designed to strengthen personal motivation by exploring a person’s own reasons for change within an atmosphere of acceptance and compassion.
Elizabeth Ruder
Assistant Professor
RIT College of Health Sciences and Technology