Serving a school where a low student-to-teacher ratio allows her to truly connect with her students has helped Ruth Madden Foreman become the educator she is today.

“I really am able to get to know my students on a much deeper level,” says Foreman. “It’s more than just a first-name basis. I get to know their lives, their learning styles.”

Foreman earned her doctor of nursing practice degree from Columbia University and worked as a nurse practitioner for eight years before making the move to academia. Since then, she has become deeply involved in the Carlow community, currently serving on several advisory boards including the policy committee for the College of Health & Wellness.

She teaches nurse practitioner students pediatric health assessment techniques at the university’s Campus Laboratory School, which caters to children ages preschool through grade eight. She’s also widely published in peer-reviewed journals. Recent areas of interest include racial bias in dermatology and pharmacogenomics.

In 2020, prior to the pandemic, she received an award from Carlow’s Center for Digital Learning Innovation in part for her efforts to provide captioning for her recorded lectures.

Continuing to offer high-quality education through the pandemic has required clarity of purpose, she says.

“We’ve had leniency where we needed to. My students work as nurses in the hospitals, so being understanding to them has been really important. But also, we have objectives we need to complete and (we have to ask), ‘How can we do this with the situation we have right now?’”