Ruth obtained her PhD at the University of Leuven (Belgium) in 2001, after which she was a postdoctoral fellow at the Pennington Biomedical Research Center in Baton Rouge (LA, USA) in Dr Claude Bouchard’s Human Genetics laboratory. There, her research mainly concerned the identification of genetic variants for energy expenditure and fat oxidation through linkage and association studies. In July 2005, she joined the MRC Epidemiology Unit of the Institute of Metabolic Science in Cambridge (England) to become Group Leader of the Genetic Aetiology of Obesity Programme. She also lectured at Department of Genetics of the University of Cambridge. Ruth joined the Mount Sinai School of Medicine in New York in December 2011, and remains an honorary member of the MRC Epidemiology Unit in Cambridge.