Cheryl Rucker-Whitaker, MD, MPH

Dr. Cheryl Rucker-Whitaker is director of preventive cardiology and research in the Heart Center for Women and faculty at the Rush University Hypertension Center. She is an assistant professor of medicine and preventive medicine at Rush University Medical Center in Chicago. She conducts intervention research on the lifestyle factors that affect overall health and living, particularly in people with multiple chronic conditions. Dr. Whitaker has been funded by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation to work with urban communities of color to teach and evaluate self-management practices for community dwelling participants with common chronic conditions (asthma, diabetes, hypertension, low back pain, and cardiovascular disease).  Additionally, Dr. Rucker-Whitaker is a coinvestigator on a National Institutes of Health-funded behavioral clinical trial  to evaluate the efficacy of a self-management intervention for participants with moderate heart failure. Her expertise continues to develop in the adaptation of such curricula to diverse populations.

She received her medical degree from the Washington University School of Medicine and her Master's in Public Health degree from the Harvard School of Public Health. She completed her training in internal medicine at Stanford University and the University of California San Francisco, where she developed expertise in the medical care of the diverse populations of the Bay area. She was a recipient of the Secretary of Health and Human Services Award for Innovations in Health for her proposal to develop an exercise program in urban African-American women and the Midwest Trainee Investigator Award given by the Central Society for Clinical Research.

Dr. Rucker-Whitaker is certified as an expert trainer of the Stanford Chronic Disease Self-Management Program.