Melissa Villarreal is a William Averette Anderson Fund (BAF) Fellow and PhD candidate in the Department of Sociology at the University of Colorado Boulder. She has worked on projects looking at women’s experiences during and after a disaster, the benefits of mentoring for marginalized doctoral students of color, structural vulnerability and reproductive health access for Mexican-origin immigrant women, and parental notification and access to abortion among minors. In addition to her research endeavors, Villarreal works as a graduate research assistant at the Natural Hazards Center, working on several research projects concerning the enhancement of the ethical quality of disaster research, the increase of diversity in the hazards and disaster field, and the reduction of post-disaster vulnerabilities for marginalized communities. Villarreal is currently working on her dissertation project: an intersectional, multi-level analysis of Mexican immigrant women and their disproportionate vulnerability in post-disaster recovery. This project examines the long-term housing recovery of Mexican immigrants in Houston, Texas, after Hurricane Harvey.
Villarreal was awarded the National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship in 2019, giving her three years of funding to conduct her work in Houston. In 2021, she was awarded the American Sociological Association Doctoral Dissertation Research Improvement Grant to continue this project and was selected as a Kinder Scholar for Rice University’s Kinder Scholar Program. In addition, she was a 2021 Association for Public Policy Analysis and Management Equity & Inclusion Fellow.