Dr. Ruest attended medical school at the University of Massachusetts Medical School and graduated in the Alpha Omega Alpha Honor Society. She subsequently completed a Pediatrics Residency at Massachusetts General Hospital and stayed on for a Chief Resident year, followed by a Pediatric Emergency Medicine Fellowship at Brown University/Hasbro Children's Hospital. During fellowship, she also completed a Masters in Public Health at Brown University. She is currently the Pediatric Emergency Medicine Trauma Liaison, a Rhode Island Hospital Injury Prevention Center faculty member, and PEM Fellowship Core Faculty, leading the Injury Prevention Research Track. Her research interests include childhood injuries and social determinants of health.
Dr. Ruest's main reserach focus is on child maltreatment (child abuse and neglect) and mitigating sociodemographic disparities that exist in child maltreatment evaluations and child protective services reporting. She is currently working on studies to identify disparities in clinician documentation and abuse evaluations and to develop tools to identify high risk presentations regardless of the patients' racial, ethnic, or socioeconomic background.
Informed by her own lived experiences, Dr. Ruest also has clinical and research interests in social determinants of health, particularly food insecurity, and has led collaborative needs assessment and intervention studies to evaluate and address food insecurity within Rhode Island.
In addition, she is a member of the Pediatric Emergency Care Applied Research Network (PECARN) Child Abuse and Neglect Research Interest Group as well as the Injury Prevention Research Interest Group, and a member of the Massachusetts Chapter of the American Academy of Pediatrics Committe on Child Abuse and Neglect. She was awarded the Division of Pediatric Emergency Medicine Director’s Clinical Excellence Award in 2019, The Department of Emergency Medicine PEM Rising Star Faculty Award in 2022, and the Department of Emergency Medicine Outstanding Young Investigator Research Award in 2023. She provides research mentorship to numerous past and current PEM and Child Abuse Pediatrics Fellows at Hasbro Children's Hospital, as well as Brown University medical, undergraduate, and graduate students.
