Dr. Ruger is an associate professor at Yale University at the Schools of Public Health, Medicine, and Graduate School of Arts and Sciences and Adjunct faculty at the Law School. She is Senior Research Fellow at the MacMillan Center for International and Area Studies and former Co-Director of the Yale-WHO Collaborating Centre for Health Promotion, Policy and Research. She is a faculty associate of Yale’s Interdisciplinary Center for Bioethics, Center for Interdisciplinary Research on AIDS (CIRA), and the Rudd Center for Food Policy and Obesity. She received a bachelor’s degree in Political Economy from the University of California-Berkeley, master’s degrees from Oxford University and the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy, and a doctoral degree from Harvard University. Following a post-doctoral fellowship (Bell Fellowship) at Harvard's Center for Population and Development Studies, she served on the health and development satellite secretariat of WHO Director-General Dr. Gro Harlem Brundtland's Transition Team. She then worked as a health economist at the World Bank and later served as Speechwriter to President James D. Wolfensohn. Previously she worked as one of two non-partisan Health Policy Analysts for Massachusetts Governor William Weld’s Task Force on the Health Care Industry, Governor’s Council on Economic Growth and Technology.  She co-authored the Task Force Report with policy recommendations for health financing and insurance reform in Massachusetts. She has advised national and state governments on health finance and insurance reform. Dr. Ruger was a member of the Institute of Medicine's Global Health Governance Working Group, Committee on the U.S. Commitment to Global Health, and is currently a member of the Ethics Subcommittee of the Advisory Committee to the Director at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).

Her research interests focus in health economics, ethics, and politics on the political economy of health and include health financing and insurance; health, health systems, and economic development; the economic evaluation of addiction programs and emergency and humanitarian services; health and social justice; global health justice; and global health governance. These contributions are unified by an overarching interest in disparities and equity in health and health care, focusing on vulnerable and impoverished populations at the national and global level. She has published both theoretical and empirical work on equity and efficiency of health system access, financing, resource allocation, policy reform and the social determinants of health.

Dr. Ruger’s work has been published in Lancet; British Medical Journal; American Journal of Public Health; Quarterly Journal of Medicine; Academic Emergency Medicine; Yale Journal of Law and the Humanities; Bulletin of the World Health Organization; Journal of Epidemiology and Community Health; Cornell Journal of Law and Public Policy; Health Affairs; Value Health; and Journal of Health Politics, Policy and Law.

Professor Ruger's book, Health and Social Justice, is forthcoming in 2009 with the Clarendon Press of Oxford University Press.