Ruthie joined Georgia Tech's Center for Serve-Learn-Sustain in 2017. In her role as Service Learning and Partnerships Specialist, her work focuses on deepening the capacity of faculty and students to understand and act on equity as central to the creation of sustainable communities. She currently co-leads the Sustainable Communities Internship Program and serves as the Co-PI of "Public Interest Technology for First Year Engineers," a collaboration with GT's Writing and Communication Program. She is trained in participatory facilitation and is pursuing a Technologies of Participation Facilitator certification, following the conclusion of a mastery course in December 2022.  

Before coming to Serve-Learn-Sustain, Ruthie completed a PhD in American Studies and African American Studies at Yale University.  Her research engaged equity at the intersection of race, power, and education in the American South; the resulting book, Students of the Dream: Resegregation in a Southern City, was published by Harvard University Press in 2017 and won the Susanne M. Glasscock Humanities Book Prize for Interdisciplinary Scholarship in 2018. This background in educational equity research equipped her to pursue equity-across-the-curriculum work at Georgia Tech via groups such as the Office of Undergraduate Education Equity Collective and to nurture the work of the Community of Practice on Higher Ed-Community Partnerships, a project of the RCE Greater Atlanta.  

Her volunteer work around equity includes service as the Secretary of the Board of Marietta YELLS (Youth Empowerment through Learning, Leading, and Serving).