Ruth Fassinger

Ruth E. Fassinger is an American educator and counseling psychologist whose academic career centered on training counselors and researching sexual identity development. She earned her bachelor's and master's degrees from the State University of New York in 1973 and 1978 and completed her doctorate at Ohio State University in 1987. She spent nearly three decades on the faculty of the University of Maryland, College Park, from 1987 to 2016, where she taught in the Department of Counseling, Higher Education, and Special Education and now holds the rank of professor emerita, and she also held academic leadership roles at John F. Kennedy University and California State University, Stanislaus. In 1996 she developed, with Susan R. McCarn, a widely cited model of lesbian and gay identity development describing identity formation as two parallel processes, one an individual's internal awareness and acceptance of a minority sexual identity and the other a sense of membership within a broader community. She received the American Psychological Association's Early Career Scientist-Researcher Award in 1997 and later served as president of the Society of Counseling Psychology.