By Tucker Carden
University of Alabama at Birmingham School of Nursing alumna Asiah Ruffin, PhD, RN, (BSN 2019, PhD 2024), is the inaugural recipient of the Association for Leadership Science in Nursing’s Rising Star in Scholarly Writing Award. The award recognizes an emerging ALSN member whose promising scholarly writing demonstrates early excellence and potential to significantly contribute to the advancement of nursing leadership science. Ruffin was honored at ALSN’s annual conference in September in Los Angeles, adding to the School’s longstanding involvement and excellence within the Association.
A two-time graduate of the School, Ruffin is a Medical Informatics Postdoctoral Fellow at the VA Tennessee Valley Health Care System and a master’s student in Biomedical Informatics at the Vanderbilt University School of Medicine. She is a prolific scholar, as is well-evidenced by this honor, authoring or co-authoring 15 peer-reviewed articles since 2022.
Ruffin credits her stints at the School, in both the BSN and PhD programs, for her exceedingly productive scholarship and its current culmination in the form of national acclaim.
“I am beyond grateful for my collaborations at UAB and the exceptional School of Nursing faculty who helped make this recognition possible,” she said. “The excellence in scholarship, visionary leadership and supportive mentorship I experienced at UAB continue to shape my work, even as my career has taken me to another institution.”
Ruffin is adamant that “this award reflects UAB’s impact in specialized fields like nursing leadership science.”