Ruble, far right, and her sisters, Leslie, far left, and
Lori, center.
life with my sister, Leslie,” Ruble said.
That first class became the foundation for a
new career.
“I went back and took a lot of classes in
psychology one semester and I fell in love with
it,” Ruble said. “Recognizing that we really didn’t
have a lot of (autism) research, I went ahead
and switched careers from microbiology into
psychology of all things.”
She earned her master’s degree in
rehabilitative psychology. What she observed
opened up her eyes.
“You might have somebody with a disability but that
doesn’t necessarily mean they have a handicap,” Ruble said.
“They can have an impairment so they might have some kind
of challenge but with the right resources in the environment
they can overcome that and be as much of a participant as
anybody else, so that pushed me into asking how we could
enhance the environment and provide more support from the
environment to help people.”
As she worked to form an autism treatment program at
Vanderbilt University and an autism outpatient program
at the University of Louisville, she saw firsthand the many
obstacles for families navigating autism.
“By seeing the challenges that families face in trying to get
services, the challenges that teachers have in providing the
best quality educational program, the challenges that service
providers have in meeting the unique needs of children and
adults with autism and how parents have to negotiate all
“You might have somebody with a
disability but that doesn’t necessarily
mean they have a handicap.”
these different things really kept pushing me into the area
of services research and implementation science research in
autism,” Ruble said.
All of these clinical and personal experiences led her
to collaborate with a former professor to land a National
Institutes of Health (NIH)-funded project to study
environment supports for autistic children inside schools.
“So it was after that first (NIH) funding that really led me
to think, ‘ok, maybe I am a researcher,’” Ruble said.
Her work inside schools continues to center around the
Collaborative Model for Promoting Competence and Success
(COMPASS).
“My current research is focused on trying to really work
with parents and teachers to develop meaningful goals for
that student or that child with autism, develop intervention
plans based on the goals, and then to support that teacher in
the implementation of those plans before finally comparing
the outcomes based on children who have COMPASS and
those who do not.”
COE COMMUNICATOR | OCTOBER 2016
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