Ruth Howes is professor emerita of physics and astronomy at Ball State University. She currently lives in Santa Fe, New Mexico after retiring as chair of the Physics Department at Marquette University in 2008. She is a nuclear physicist who has a primary interest in improving undergraduate education in physics (through service on the National Task Force on Undergraduate Physics and as Project Director for Strategic Programs for Innovation in Undergraduate Physics) and work with the MoNA (Modular Neutron Array) collaboration at the National Superconducting Cyclotron Laboratory in which teams of undergraduates from physics departments without graduate programs constructed, tested and operated a neutron detector. She is the co-author of Their Day in the Sun: Women of the Manhattan Project and has an on-going interest in the history of women physicists.