Remembering Alum Dori Pelz-Sherman on Her Birthday

Dori Pelz-Sherman, PhD

On June 1, Clinical Psychology alum Dori Pelz-Sherman, PhD 2009, would have celebrated her 58^th Birthday. Dori passed away on July 13, 2017 — a devastating loss for her family, friends, and our Fielding community.

Dori was an exemplary representative of our education model. She started her graduate work while living in the San Francisco Bay Area and raising three children, and then moved with her family to North Carolina. After receiving her doctoral degree in 2010, Dori worked to support families with special-needs children, and patients with a wide array of mental-health challenges.

Her husband Michael and several Fielding alumni and students, including Jeanie Metivier, helped start the Dr. Dori Pelz-Sherman Memorial Scholarship Fund. The Fund will provide annual scholarships to Clinical Psychology students whose research focuses on mental-health practice for people with disabilities, especially children with autism.

The dissertations of our psychology students are truly ground-breaking. Their graduate work contributes to the research community, and to the populations they ultimately work with. A scholarship from a fund like this will help students mitigate some of the costs associated with their research, such as data collection and research-related travel.

To make the first scholarship happen, we need to raise $25,000, towards which $5,000 has already been raised. In celebration of Dori’s outstanding life and contribution to our Fielding community, we invite you to make a gift to the Fund today. Every gift will be matched by a generous contribution from Michael Pelz-Sherman.

A gift of any amount will directly support a student, whose work will advance knowledge and practice in the mental health field for people with disabilities.