After earning a B.A. from Centre College in Danville, Ky., with a major in music and minor in creative writing, Alex Ruffner ’09 returned to Chattanooga to consider her next step. While considering her options, she worked in food service and at High Point Climbing and volunteered in the Child Life Department at the Children’s Hospital at Erlanger.

At Erlanger, Ruffner worked on Saturdays in the playroom, providing toys and normalizing the hospital environment for the youngest patients. “Researching how I could marry music (a lifelong passion) with that, I discovered music therapy,” said Ruffner. “Music therapy uses music to treat nonmusical goals,” she explained, and gave as examples the use of music to improve sensory processing or fine motor skills or to cope with trauma.

Once Ruffner identified what called to her, she enrolled in the University of Louisville’s School of Music. She completed relevant coursework, plus 1,200 clinical hours in full-time internship in the school’s Music Therapy Clinic, spending most of six months there in perioperative care, palliative care, and the Neonatal Intensive Care Unit (NICU) . She passed a challenging national board certification exam in 2017 and finished her internship with an additional NICU Music Therapy training credential (NICU-MT).

Researching how I could marry music (a lifelong passion) with that, I discovered music therapy.

“When you’re certified, you can work with patients from birth through end of life,” said Ruffner. “Since it’s such a wide range, music therapists tend to find a population we’re passionate about and then specialize.” Ruffner provides interventions for premature and medically fragile infants while working with parents to help them bond with those infants and cope with the NICU experience. Until January 2022, she also worked with older adults with chronic illnesses.

While working full-time and in-person as an essential worker, Ruffner completed an M.S. in Early Childhood and Family Development online from Missouri State University in May 2021. “I wanted to go back to school, mostly because I love learning, but I also wanted something adjacent to music therapy that would open other doors as well.” Ruffner said that as much as she loves working with newborn to five-year-old children, she chose Early Childhood and Family Development because “I think we have to work with the family as well if we want to improve the lives of children.”

Ruffner further shares her knowledge about early childhood on the editorial team of imagine.magazine, an online publication for music therapists, adjacent professions, and parents. When she’s not thinking about music therapy, Ruffner enjoys playing her banjo, and she and her partner of five years, Tyler, climb, hike, and spend time with their dogs, Lyle and Elvis.