About the author
Dr. Kathleen T. Ruddy was first affected by the pink disease in 1973 when her own mother was diagnosed with breast cancer. After this occurrence, she became devoted to helping women who had breast cancer. Many years later, Dr. Ruddy became a breast cancer surgeon, Founder and Medical Director of the Breast Service at Clara Maass Medical Center, and Founder and Executive Director of the Breast Health and Healing Foundation. Additionally, Dr. Ruddy founded her own private practice in New Jersey in 1999.
Dr. Ruddy began her career within healthcare forty years ago when she worked as a unit clerk at the Fairfax Hospital in Virginia. In order to follow her dreams of advocating for women’s health, she enrolled part-time at George Mason University and eventually enrolled in a physician assistant program at George Washington University in Washington, D.C. Throughout her work as a physician assistant, she discovered that she had made the right choice but wanted to move further into clinical medicine.
She decided to follow a path into medical school to become a doctor. In 1989, Dr. Ruddy was awarded her Doctor of Medicine degree after years of hard work, perseverance, and dedication. Surgery was the first choice she made while in medical school and pursued this during her residency training. Dr. Ruddy was the only woman in her residency program and was ten years older than the other residents. Despite this, she pressed on with the program and finished it in 1994 as chief resident.
As she worked forward in her surgical residency program, Dr. Ruddy began looking for a way to tie her love of surgery and women’s health advocacy. During an elective rotation at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center, she discovered the answer she was looking for: she decided to become a breast cancer surgeon. She worked with the Chief of this hospital to create a fellowship specifically suited for her. In July 1994, Dr. Ruddy began her Fellowship on the Breast Service and was later recruited to create the Breast Service for the Clara Maass Medical Center in Belleville, New Jersey.
By the year 2000, Ruddy created her own private practice at Clara Maass Medical Center. She began focusing her vision on how to better understand the causes of breast cancer instead of solely the treatment for it. She began thinking of ways to expand her work to understanding the causes of breast cancer and ways to prevent it.
In 2006, Dr. Ruddy decided to apply for a new graduate program at McGill University in Montreal called the International Masters for Health Leadership. Ruddy felt that this would be the perfect opportunity to combine her experience as a breast cancer surgeon and her vision to advocate breast cancer prevention.
In the spring of 2006, Dr. Ruddy and seventeen other students began a rigorous 18-month program to learn about health leadership management and tactics. After all this time working within the surgical field and advocating women’s health, Dr. Ruddy discovered that her life’s work was to help as many women as possible avoid breast cancer completely and to work toward the “pure cure,” prevention of this disease. Thus, in 2008, Dr. Kathleen Ruddy created the Breast Health and Healing Foundation dedicated to discovering the causes of breast cancer and using the knowledge to prevent the disease.
After many years working with women diagnosed with breast cancer, she believes that we must understand the causes of breast cancer in order to save as many lives as possible. Dr. Ruddy continues to care for her patients in her own private practice while growing the Breast Health and Healing Foundation in order to share the message of breast cancer prevention.