Dosser room celebrated at ECU Family Therapy Clinic

Some people described Dr. David Dosser as a pioneer of marriage and therapy in North Carolina. Others appreciated his love for East Carolina athletics, which was personified when Dosser was a longtime faculty athletic representative at East Carolina University and served on national committees as a university liaison to the National Collegiate Athletic Association.

And there are some former ECU students who referred to him as “dad,” as an acronym for David A. Dosser.

Dr. Damon Rappleyea, left, and David Dosser’s son, Alex, unveil a plaque for the naming of the Dr. David A. Dosser Therapy Room. (Photos by Mack Craven)

Due to Dosser’s many contributions, especially to the ECU marriage and family therapy program and elsewhere on campus, a formal dedication ceremony was held to name a Dr. David A. Dosser Therapy Room inside the ECU Family Therapy Clinic. Ceremony attendees included Dr. Sharon Ballard, who is chair of the Department of Human Development and Family Science, College of Health and Human Performance interim dean Dr. Stacey Altman and Dr. Angela Lamson, interim assistant vice chancellor for economic and community engagement.

The late Dosser was the first director of the ECU master’s program in marriage and family therapy. He retired from ECU in 2015 after a 26-year career of teaching, research and service. He died in April of 2020. His wife, Kathy, attended the naming ceremony.

“Above all else, he loved his work and was energized by his role of supervising students in therapy,” Kathy Dosser said. “He would come home content and not visibly frazzled by the problems he had helped students work through. It was evident to me that the learning process, for him, fueled success for life. He always went after the learning that would make him a better supervisor and therapist, as well as a better person. I want to thank you for being here and for honoring David and our family in this way.”

A program for the dedication of the Dr. David A. Dosser Therapy Room included tributes and anecdotes about Dosser’s impact. An excerpt:

“The room named for him in the ECU Family Therapy clinic was his favorite space as both a professor and therapist. In that room, he trained more than 300 master’s students and several doctoral student supervisors in training. In that room, he also spent days and nights sitting alongside students as they learned their therapeutic skills. He took them on as co-therapists and formed long-term mentoring relationships that were evident before and after his death. Students would return to Greenville to visit David and pour back into him what he poured into them when they were at their most vulnerable as students.

“David not only cared for students, but he collaborated with faculty members from different disciplines and community partners to design wraparound services so no one who needed help would go without the best that ECU and the community could offer. David brought excellence, quality, character and traditions that made the ECU marriage and family therapy program one of the premier programs in the country.”