Melissa Villarreal

Melissa Villarreal is currently an Oak Ridge Institute for Science and Education Fellow at the U.S. Forest Service. Her work primarily centers around the post-disaster recovery trajectories of vulnerable populations, although she has led and contributed to several different projects throughout the years. She has worked on projects looking at women’s experiences during and after disaster, structural vulnerability and reproductive health access for Mexican-origin women, and parental notification and access to abortion among minors. 

Villarreal recently received a PhD in sociology from the University of Colorado Boulder. Her dissertation was an intersectional, multi-level analysis of Mexican-origin women and their post-disaster recovery trajectories in the context of cumulative disaster impacts. The project was based in Houston, Texas, and focused on recovery from Hurricane Harvey, which made landfall in 2017. Villarreal was awarded the National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship in 2019 and the American Sociological Association Doctoral Dissertation Research Improvement Grant in 2021.

Villarreal is also an alumna of the Bill Anderson Fund, which is dedicated to advancing the success of minority professionals in the hazards and disasters field.