Background

Ruth Clifford Engs, born as Ruth Clifford, came to the world on September 15, 1939, in Ridgeway, Pennsylvania, United States. She is a daughter of Theodore Alexander Clifford and Elinor Kay Clifford.

She was raised in Bethel, Vermont.

Education

Ruth Clifford Engs studied at the local schools of Bethel, Vermont. During her junior year in high school, she entered Cushing Academy in Ashburnham, Massachusetts. She graduated in 1957 and enrolled at the University of Vermont in Burlington where four years later she received a Bachelor of Liberal Arts with a major in chemistry and minors in English literature and biology.

Unsatisfied by a two-year ‘bench research’ work in a capacity of a laboratory assistant, Engs traveled briefly to Australia and within a year came back to the United States and settled down in San Francisco, California. In 1968, she gained a diploma in nursing at Merritt College in Oakland Hills, California. Two years later, Engs pursued her studies at the University of Oregon where she obtained Master of Science and Master of Arts degrees, in Counseling Psychology and Health Education.

Looking for a doctorate, she enrolled at the University of Tennessee. She graduated in 1973 with a Doctor of Education degree.

Career

Ruth Clifford Engs started her career in 1961 from a two-year work in a capacity of a laboratory research assistant to a virologist Elmer Pfefferkorn at the Bacteriology Department of Harvard Medical School.

In 1970, Engs became an assistant professor at Dalhousie University, Halifax, Nova Scotia. She taught health education and nursing courses for a year. Then, in a couple of years after she had left the post, she occupied the same position at the Department of Health and Safety Education in the School of Health, Physical Education and Recreation of Indiana University. By 1980, Ruth Clifford Engs had been promoted to an associate professor at the Department of Applied Health Science. At the beginning of the new decade, she was named a full professor. Engs’s long collaboration with the institution ended in 2003.

Following an alcohol education program initiated by the Dean of Student’s Office, Ruth Clifford Engs devoted the first twenty years at the university to the exploration of aspects for the determinants of university student drinking behavior. From 1976 to 1988, the scientist directed the Annual Drug and Alcohol Workshop. As a result of the studies, Engs with a help of her colleagues produced the 1975 film ‘Booz and Yous’ and ‘Drinking and Thinking’ ten years later. Engs studied different aspects of college student drinking in the United States and abroad, and issued a lot of papers and textbooks related to the topic, including ‘Responsible Drug and Alcohol Use’ (1979), ‘Alcohol and Other Drugs: Self Responsibility’ (1987), and ‘Teaching Health Education in the Elementary School’ (1978) in collaboration with Molly Wantz.

In addition to her researching activity at Indiana University, Ruth Clifford Engs has taken an active part at the board of directors of many national organizations. She has also practiced private stress reduction and self-hypnosis.

By the beginning of the 1990s, Engs had enlarged the line of her investigations and initiated the studies of the impact of alcohol on society in cross-cultural and historical context. The survey resulted in a number of publications, starting with a 1997 ‘Archeology’. Then such works as ‘The Progressive Era Health Reform Movement: A Historical Dictionary’ (2003), ‘The Eugenics Movement: An Encyclopedia’ (2005), and ‘Conversations in the Abbey’ (2007) followed. In 2008, Engs edited a book on Upton Sinclair.

On top of her publications, Engs also taught Introduction to Health Counseling, Research Methods, Theories of Addictive Behaviors, Personal Health, and Epidemiology and Human Diseases. She served as an adjunct faculty member at Union Institute & University in Cincinnati, Ohio from 1989 to 1995, and at Walden University at Minneapolis, Minnesota, from 1999 to 2000, working on various curriculums for the both of the institutions.

Achievements

• Ruth Clifford Engs is an accomplished health educator and researcher who produced a great number of important publications on the impact of alcohol and other addictions on society.
  
  While teaching at Indiana University, Engs elaborated the Student Alcohol Questionnaire which is applied by many students and researchers in the world.
  
  Her achievements in the sphere of research were marked by the Outstanding Faculty Collaborative Research Award from Indiana University Bloomington, and the Robert Kirk Distinguished Alumni Award from the University of Tennessee’s Department of Health Education.
  
  In 2003, she was named Professor Emeritus of Applied Health Science.

Works

More photos

• book

  • The Progressive Era's Health Reform Movement: A Historical Dictionary

    (Covering the years leading up to the Progressive Era thro...)

    2003
  • The Eugenics Movement: An Encyclopedia

    (Although focused on the United States during the heyday o...)

    2005
  • Unseen Upton Sinclair

    (A book containing nine unpublished works of the writer ed...)

    2008
  • Clean Living Movements: American Cycles of Health Reform

    (The book tells the story of a health reform movement)

    2000
  • Controversies in the Addiction's Field

    (A book edited by Ruth Clifford Engs)

    1990
  • Teaching Health Education in the Elementary School

    (A book in collaboration with M.S. Wantz)

    1978
  • Alcohol and Other Drugs: Self Responsibility 1987
  • Responsible Drug and Alcohol Use 1979

Views

Quotations: "I am driven to write and to do research. It is most rewarding to see results of statistical analysis, which no one has seen before, careening out of a printer. It is also a great emotional experience to see a completed work finally ln print. In the social-cultural-historical research, I find it most interesting to discover patterns in the Past which are also found in the present."

Membership

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  American School Health Association , United States

• 

  Society of Health and Physical Educators , United States

Personality

Ruth Clifford Engs has been an instrument rated pilot.

Interests

• Avocations: flying, golfing, ranching, acting, hiking

Connections

Ruth Clifford Engs married her first husband, Bill Engs, on July 24, 1965. They divorced in 1973.

Once flying in the late 1980s as an instrument rated pilot, she met her second husband, Jeffrey Lee Franz, whom she married on October 2, 1987.

Father:

Theodore Alexander

Mother:

Elinor Kay Clifford

husband:

Jeffrey Lee Franz

husband:

Bill Engs

colleague:

Elmer R. Pfefferkorn

colleague:

David Justin Hanson