Our Featured Fellow for December 2023 is Melissa Villarreal, a PhD Candidate in the Department of Sociology at the University of Colorado (CU) Boulder. 

Melissa joined the Bill Anderson Fund as a Fellow in 2017. She has held several leadership positions on the BAF Student Council’s Executive Board. She served on the BAF Programming Committee from 2017-2018 and the BAF Fundraising Committee in 2018. She contributed to the inaugural BAF Legacy Magazine with a piece entitled “Significance of Language in Hazards and Disaster Research and Practice.” She also drafted and disseminated the BAF Newsletter from 2019-2020 and held the Secretary position on the BAF Student Council from 2021-2022. She presented her work, “Long Term Housing Recovery among Mexican Immigrants: How Service Providers Navigate Anti-Immigrant Disaster Recovery Policies” at the 2021 Natural Hazards Research and Applications Workshop (NHW). Most recently, she served as the liaison between the BAF and the Natural Hazards Center to facilitate the BAF Lightning Talks at the annual NHW from 2022-2023.

Melissa’s research centers around the post-disaster recovery trajectories of vulnerable populations. She has also worked on projects looking at structural vulnerability and reproductive health access for Mexican-origin women and parental notification and access to abortion among minors. In addition to her own research endeavors, Melissa is a graduate research assistant at the Natural Hazards Center at CU Boulder, contributing to 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.  

Melissa  is currently working on her dissertation project: an intersectional, multi-level analysis of Mexican-origin women and their disproportionate vulnerability in post-disaster recovery after Hurricane Harvey in Houston, Texas. Melissa was awarded the National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship in 2019, giving her a full three years of funding to conduct her work in Houston. In 2021, Melissa was awarded the American Sociological Association Doctoral Dissertation Research Improvement Grant to continue this project. She has also received other accolades, including the CU Boulder’s Center to Advance Research and Teaching in the Social Sciences Graduate Student Award, CU Boulder’s Beverly Sears Graduate Student Award, and several other small grants from CU Boulder’s Department of Sociology and Institute of Behavioral Science. In 2021, she was selected to be a Kinder Scholar for Rice University’s Kinder Scholar Program. The Kinder Scholar Program, located in Houston, selects researchers, post-doctoral fellows, and graduate students who conduct high quality research in the area. She was also a 2021 Association for Public Policy Analysis and Management Equity & Inclusion Fellow.

In her spare time, Melissa enjoys attending concerts, volunteering at her local humane society, and recording a podcast with her best friend.

You can find Melissa’s publications here and connect with her on LinkedIn here.

RESEARCH INTERESTS: sociology of disasters, race/ethnicity, racialization, gender, immigration, intersectionality, social vulnerability, qualitative methods, community engaged research