Rima Rudd is a health educator whose work centers on the design and evaluation of public health programs for social change. She has worked primarily in school and community settings. Her interests focus on pedagogy, health and literacy links, and participatory and collaborative strategies for learning and for change.

Inspired by Freire's educational philosophy, Rudd has expanded the "problem posing" approach to the development of health materials and has studied both the processes and effects of learner developed materials in the community, school, and union/worksite settings. She is also engaged in participatory and collaborative research. Her interests in strategies include the application of social marketing tools and techniques, entertainment education approaches, and attention to literacy issues in the design of all health communications.

A good deal of Rudd's current work focuses on health literacy. She works with the adult education sector and with the public health and medical sectors. Rudd is a senior reseach fellow of the National Center for the Study of Adult Learning and Literacy and serve as Principal Investigator on studies specifically focused on literacy skills needed to engage in a vast array of health related activities. She is examining barriers faced by adults as they attempt to understand and engage in health actions at home, in the workplace, in the community,and in the voting booth -- as well as in medical and dental health care service settings.

This attention to barriers and facilitating factors involved in health navigation [making one's way through the vast array of written and verbal health related information,directives, and processes]is also reflected in Rudd's other literacy related studies: a clinical trial of a novel patient education approach in arthritis care; an exploration of the pathways linking education and health; and a re-analysis of the National Adult Literacy Survey data with attention to health related tasks.

Finally, Rudd is engaged on the policy level with literacy related analyses for the Office of Disease Prevention and Health Promotion, NIH Oral Health Division, and in committee work with the National Institutes of Science exploring health literacy and adult literacy measures.

Sc.D., 1986, The Johns Hopkins School of Hygiene and Public Health