Ruth Staus, DNP, MS, APRN, ANP-BC, is a Professor in the College of Nursing and Health Sciences at Metropolitan State University, St. Paul, Minnesota. In addition to teaching at Metro State, Staus is a Professor and Practitioner of Global Health and Social Medicine with the Haitian social medicine NGO EqualHealth. She is a founding member of the Social Medicine Consortium Global Campaign Against Racism, Minnesota chapter (April 2018–present). She was a member of the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Studies/Social Medicine Case Study Project at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Studies at Harvard University (spring 2016–fall 2017), which culminated in the published teaching case “Vicodin as a Treatment for Structural Violence.” In April 2019, Status was named a Diversity Scholar in the Social Sciences with the National Center for Institutional Diversity at the University of Michigan. She is a member of the eGFR Working Group at the Institute for Healing and Justice in Medicine, UC Berkeley. The activist scholarship of this group led to the end, nationally in 2022, of the racist practice of racial “correction” of eGFR.
Staus’ activist scholarship in decoloniality and anti-racism has been shaped through teachers, mentors, students, and colleagues across the globe—most of them of the majority world (BIPOC)—in social medicine, the social sciences, and humanities, who have generously shared their knowledge and engagement in deep critical analysis of the roots of inequality. Some of the people who have been the most important influences on her work are Michelle Morse, Joia Mukherjee, Salman Keshavjee, and Paul Farmer at Harvard; Reverend Dr. Eddie Eustach, HUM, Haiti; Adam Bitunguramye, University of Rwanda; Agnes Binagwaho, University of Global Health Equity, Rwanda; Camara Jones, UPenn; Scott Stonington, University of Michigan; Seth Holmes, Fabian Fernandez, and Elyse Katz, UC Berkeley; Rupa Marya; Ruha Benjamin, Princeton University; Dorothy Roberts, Harriet Washington; Resma Menakam; Ijeoma Opara, Wayne State University; and Michael Westerhaus, Aarti Bhatt, Brendan Johnson, Jonas Atilus, and Rachel Hardeman, University of Minnesota.