Melissa Brown

Melissa Brown is Deputy Director of the Whitney and Betty MacMillan Center for International and Area Studies, where she oversees the Center’s overall strategy, academic programs and appointments, partnerships, grant programs, fundraising, events, and communications. With Director Sunil Amrith, she supervises the Center’s Regional Futures Lab, which includes Yale Global Table.

Brown joined the MacMillan Center from the University of Pennsylvania, where she was the inaugural Senior Director of the Environmental Innovations Initiative, a provostial program created in 2020 with the mission of catalyzing solutions to significant real-world environmental challenges by fostering collaboration across disciplines, leading inclusive and dynamic programming on- and off-campus and forming strategic partnerships. During that time, she led the process to develop tailored Academic Climate Commitments for each of Penn’s 12 schools. 

Before Penn, Brown held positions at Yale with the Office of Sustainability, the Center for Environmental Law and Policy, and the School of the Environment. Prior to her career in academia, she worked for the United Nations Development Programme, managing projects focused on addressing climate change in the Global South. 

Brown is the chair of the external advisory board of the United Nations University Institute for the Advanced Study of Sustainability, a senior fellow with the International Sustainable Campus Network, and a Community of Practice member for the Higher Education Sustainability Initiative of the United Nations, and president of the board of the MEow Cat Lounge in Westbrook, Maine. She earned BFA in Acting from New York University and a joint MS in Natural Resource Management and Organizational Administration from Antioch University. She also earned her PhD from Antioch: her dissertation was titled Smart Partnerships: How Higher Education Institutions Can Enhance the Capacity of the UN to Govern the Global Commons.