Melissa A. Cornish

Board Member

• Melissa is thrilled to join the Youth Mental Health Project Board of Directors with a background in public health and an expertise in grantwriting. In her current role, Melissa serves as a grants consultant for Hanover Research, a global research and analytics firm that offers custom support to clients worldwide. Her role on the Higher Education-Grants Team affords her the opportunity to work with institutions of higher education across the U.S. by providing tailored grantwriting support, editorial assistance, programmatic design, and grant-seeking strategy development. Her extensive experience in grant development and proposal refinement span opportunities with and awards from sponsors, such as the National Institutes of Health, National Science Foundation, Patient-Centered Outcomes Research Institute, U.S. Department of Agriculture and a number of private foundations, to name a few. Prior to joining Hanover, Melissa served as a project leader at the Duke University Translational Medicine Institute where she worked closely with senior leadership and study management to build partnerships and collaborations to advance the goals of a large-scale research study and biorepository and provide business development support, grant development and proposal production, and communications and marketing.
• Her earlier roles at both the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill and Arizona State University provided her with opportunities to participate in qualitative data collection efforts and programmatic evaluations for several federally funded programs, efforts for attracting extramural funding, and business operations start-up. Melissa completed her Master of Science in Public Health with a focus on health policy at the UNC-Chapel Hill and her Bachelor of Art in Sociology and Interdisciplinary Studies at Emory University. She resides in a suburb of Charlotte, North Carolina—Lake Wylie, South Carolina—with her husband, Chris, and three school-aged children. While she embraces her roles as mother, consultant, and volunteer, her favorite pastimes either bring her into the kitchen to try out a new recipe or take her to the coast to enjoy the salt air.