Bio
Short Bio
As the founder of Club and Camp Ophelia,™ Cheryl has helped thousands of girls confront and overcome relational aggression. Her expertise has led to frequent requests for training workshops with teachers, therapists, and other adults who work with young women. In addition, she speaks to adults who confront relational aggression at home, in the workplace, and/or within the community.
Long Bio
As a Professor of Humanities in the College of Medicine and Professor of Women’s Studies at The Pennsylvania State University, Dr. Dellasega celebrates 30+ years of working in medical education and clinical care. Her scholarly work includes research on psychosocial issues and outreach to vulnerable populations, leading to recognition as an international expert on female relationship issues. Caregiving for a frail adult was a focus of her dissertation and subsequent work as a visiting professor in Jonkoping, Sweden.
Cheryl Miller Dellasega was an innovator from a young age, first crafting gothic romances as a seventh grader. She can still remember her gal pals waiting in the morning at the school doors for the latest (of course handwritten) pages that she would share for their feedback. (It should be noted that Cheryl had a great imagination but zero real experience with love relationships at that point.) In addition to fiction, she was an amateur poet who had her first poem published in a literary magazine during this time.
In eleventh grade, thanks to Title IX, Cheryl was one of four girls who qualified for the high school swim team, which was all male. She wrote a column about the experience of being a female swimmer in a male environment when several parents complained about girls “taking spots on the team” that might otherwise have gone to their sons. It was her second official publication, featured in the local newspaper.
After graduating from high school in upstate New York and having parents who were reluctant to pay for a degree in journalism, she moved to Lancaster, Pennsylvania and obtained a three-year nursing diploma, going on to work in several acute care hospitals in the Philadelphia area while living out her own version of a favorite TV show: That Girl starring Marlo Thomas.
Then came the discovery that further education was fulfilling! She returned to school, first earning a BSN at Millersville University, an MS/CRNP at the University of Delaware and PhD at Temple University. While completing her graduate degrees, she had each of her three children.
After years of clinical work, she began teaching at two other universities, then landed at Penn State University as a professor. The Dellasega family lived at the main campus in State College, PA where she ended up being the first nursing faculty to obtain tenure in ten years (pun not intended). In 1998, her family relocated and she began teaching in the humanities department of the Penn State College of Medicine where her areas of expertise were the dynamics of female relationships and narrative medicine. In 2024 she retired as an Emeritus Professor.
She is the award-winning author of ten books and founder of Club and Camp Ophelia™, an evidence-based program that has helped thousands of girls confront and overcome relational aggression. Her workshops and online resources for girls and women have garnered appreciation and praise from organizations across the country.
Her memoir, Locomotion Lullaby (LBP, 2023), describes a cross-country train trip she took in 2010, exactly one year after her husband died in an accident. It was her thesis project for her MFA, completed in 2015 at Rosemont College—the very degree she had aspired to in her younger years.
Her passions are her grandchildren, reading, community service, travel and exercise. She lives in “the sweetest place on earth:” Hershey, PA.
