In 2020, Melissa joined UF Innovate | Tech Licensing as a licensing officer and works in the medical, biotechnology, chemical, and software disciplines to connect faculty and their inventions with licensees. An active member of the Florida startup community, she is the founder of a medical device company working in the field of pharmacogenomics. She currently holds a faculty appointment at the University of Central Florida College of Medicine.
As a faculty member at MD Anderson Cancer Center Orlando, Melissa headed a biomarker research group that developed diagnostics, conducted clinical trials, and investigated the biological applications of nanoparticles. Previously, she was a founding research member of the NanoScience Technology Center at the University of Central Florida, and she was part of the Operational and Evaluation Division at the Institute for Defense Analyses (IDA), where she worked closely with the U.S. Navy and U.S. Coast Guard. She has been an invited speaker and presenter at conferences, including the American Chemical Society, Society for Neuroscience, Materials Research Society, the American Association for Cancer Research, and BioFlorida.
A returning Gator, Melissa earned her B.S. in chemistry from the University of Florida and her Ph.D. in chemistry from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where her research focused on radiopharmaceutical design and synthesis in conjunction with Harvard Medical School.