Born in 1925, Doris Goodrich received her BA in 1947 and her PhD in 1955, both in economics from the University of California at Berkeley. A Ford Foundation Fellow, she was granted a thirty-one month fellowship that included a year researching at the Library of Congress and pursuing Arabic studies at the School for Advanced International Studies at Johns Hopkins University prior to leaving for the Middle East. Goodrich was an economics professor at Penn State, State College of Washington at Pullman, and California State University at Fullerton. She died in 1971 in Brea, California.