Melissa Villarreal

Melissa Villarreal is currently an Oak Ridge Institute for Science and Education Postdoctoral Scholar at the U.S. Forest Service. She received her PhD in sociology from the University of Colorado Boulder in 2024. She also worked at the Natural Hazards Center for six years as a Graduate Research Assistant. Her work primarily centers around the post-disaster recovery trajectories of vulnerable populations. Villarreal's dissertation was an intersectional, multi-level analysis of Mexican-origin women and their post-disaster recovery trajectories in the context of cumulative disaster impacts. This project was based in Houston, Texas (where she was born and raised) 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. In 2021, she was selected to be a Kinder Scholar for Rice University’s Kinder Scholar Program. She was also a 2021 Association for Public Policy Analysis and Management Equity & Inclusion Fellow. Villarreal is a William Averette Anderson Fund (BAF) Alumna, which is dedicated to advancing the success of minority professionals in the hazards and disasters field. She currently serves as the BAF Alumni Network Chairperson.