Ruth P. Saunders University of South Carolina, USA

Ruth P. Saunders, PhD, is an professor emerita in the Department of Health Promotion, Education, and Behavior in the Arnold School of Public Health at the University of South Carolina. Dr. Saunders has 25 years of research and practice experience in conducting program, policy, and practice change in organizational settings, including preschools, schools, after-school settings, children’s group homes, and faith-based settings. Her roles in these projects, which include eight large-scale interventions, have encompassed using multi-level conceptual models to develop a comprehensive model of organizational environments, constructing scales and indexes to assess contextual factors and implementation processes, addressing challenges involved in intervention design and implementation in field-based settings, and designing and carrying comprehensive intervention implementation monitoring. She has authored or co-authored numerous publications based on her research. Dr. Saunders also has 28 years of teaching experience with master’s and doctoral level courses in program planning, program evaluation, process evaluation and implementation monitoring, and interventions targeting physical and social environments.