- Royce Fellowship
Concentration
Award Year
Faculty Sponsor: Rachel Morello-Frosch
As a Royce Fellow, Ruth Lindberg researched lead poisoning prevention from the landlord perspective, focusing on barriers landlords face in making their properties safe for young children, as well as highlighting opportunities to incentivize landlords to improve their properties. This work inspired her senior thesis and led to her first employment opportunity at the Rhode Island Department of Health. There, Ruth became increasingly aware of the disproportionate impact of these health issues on low-income communities and communities of color, and began to understand that her work in public health was incomplete without a focus on the underlying issues of poverty, affordable housing, and social justice.
Since leaving Brown, Ruth has worked primarily on housing-related public health efforts at the local, state and national levels. She is currently a senior associate with the Health Impact Project, a collaboration of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and The Pew Charitable Trusts. In this role, she helps manage and conduct health impact assessments of proposed federal policies and programs. Health impact assessment is a systematic process used to identify and address possible health implications of decisions made in non-health sectors, such as housing, transportation, education or agriculture.