User:Nesvensson~commonswiki/sandbox/Cheryl M. Svensson

Cheryl M. Svensson is an American gerontologist and psychologist.

Cheryl Svensson was born in Spring Valley, Minnesota and lives in California and Sweden. She is the Director of the Birren Center for Autobiographical Studies and a leading international authority on guided autobiography. She has been involved in the field of aging since 1970 when she first met Dr. Jim Birren at the University of Southern California when she completed her Masters in Gerontology in the first program offered at USC at the new Percy Andrews Canter. Birren was the founding dean of the center. After completing her master's degree, Svensson moved to Sweden and entered the doctoral program in psychology at the University of Lund with an emphasis on research in aging. She graduated in 2002.

In the late 1990s, Svensson reconnected with Birren and she worked with him closely until he died in 2016. They worked to further develop and expand the Autobiographical Studies program and Guided Autobiography (GAB), which Birren considered his most important work. At the suggestion of Birren, they formed the Birren Center for Autobiographical Studies with Svensson as the Director. She is a firm believer in the power of the GAB process. Teaching GAB, she realized early that GAB had the power to change the lives of the participants, which has been documented in many evaluations. The GAB program turns out to be therapeutic, if not therapy. Svensson has developed an online, interactive, seminar teaching GAB instructors all over the world, on all continents and several dozen countries. At this date, she has trained more than 500 GAB instructors.