Corey Ruder

About Corey

(updated 6/2018) Corey Ruder is a Ph.D. student working at the intersection of ecosystem health and climate change research.  She has completed the first year of her degree program at Washington State University Vancouver, where she is studying how internal waves affect nitrogen cycling in reservoirs.  As a National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellow, Corey not only loves research, but also cares about science communication and advocating for greater representation of women and minorities in STEM-related fields.  She is a recent summa cum laude graduate of St. Olaf College in Minnesota, where she received a Bachelor of Arts in Environmental Studies.  As an undergraduate, Corey was selected as a Beckman Scholar and spent a year and a half developing a reliable indicator of agricultural runoff in lakes.  She continued working for an additional year on a follow-up project linking this runoff to increased production of the powerful greenhouse gas nitrous oxide (N2O).  In addition to her extensive research on lakes, Corey has conducted a series of ecological research projects in Australia, analyzed the spread of radioactive material across a farm near Fukushima, and studied feedback loops of permafrost thaw as a research assistant in Siberia.  She has presented the results of her research at several conferences, including a poster at the American Geophysical Union 2016 Fall Meeting. She is also the founder of the Ole Thrift Shop LLC, a student-run business aimed at decreasing campus waste, and enjoys SCUBA diving, recreational boxing, and playing with dogs in her spare time.  During her year in Japan as a Luce Scholar, Corey worked in a stable isotope laboratory at the Center for Ecological Research at Kyoto University.  Her focus is on using stable isotopes to determine the nitrogen cycling processes occurring in Osaka Bay, but she has also dabbled in aikido, traveled around Japan with her research advisor to conduct experiments with his collaborators, and taken every opportunity to soak in an onsen.