Melissa obtained her B.S in Chemical Engineering from the University of Illinois, Urbana Champaign in 2022. At UIUC she worked in the Flaherty group where she studied active site requirements for direct ester hydrogenation. She also worked with Dr. Vanda Glezakou at Pacific Northwest National lab, where she generated DFT data and built an ML model to determine the optimal amine solvent/diene pair for carbon dioxide capture.

In fall 2022 Melissa joined the Kulik and Román groups as a Ph.D. student in Chemical Engineering. Now, Melissa seeks to quantify the role of electric fields in heterogeneous catalysis with new spectroscopy techniques and polarizable molecular models.