Melissa is a licensed psychologist and Associate Teaching Professor of Psychology at Penn State, where she leads the Forensic Psychology and Advanced Abnormal Psychology curriculum. She holds a Ph.D. in Counseling Psychology and has spent more than fifteen years conducting clinical assessments spanning hospital, university, and private practice settings. Her research and teaching focus on how people form judgments, change their minds, and make decisions under pressure, the same questions that drive every deliberation room.
What that means in practice: study designs are held to academic scrutiny. Mock trials, focus groups, and community attitude work are run to stress-test the case, not to confirm it. Findings are reported in language a trial team can act on.
When Melissa prepares a witness, she is reading what a clinical assessment background trains you to read: defensive posture, anxiety patterns, the variation between what someone says and what they actually communicate. She hears the testimony the way an opposing attorney will probe it, and shapes preparation accordingly. The same training informs how she helps trial teams evaluate the credibility of opposing experts, the soundness of their methodology, and the places where their conclusions overrun their data.
She, alongside her family, reside in Maryland.
