Melissa Brown

Melissa Brown is Deputy Director of the Whitney and Betty MacMillan Center for International and Area Studies, where she helps to guide the Center’s overall strategy and oversees its academic programs, grant programs, fellowship and visiting scholar programs, partnerships, and communications. 

Brown joined the MacMillan Center from the University of Pennsylvania, where she was the inaugural Senior Director of the Environmental Innovations Initiative, which is a provostial program created in 2020 to catalyze 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. 

Before she started at Penn in 2021, Brown was at Yale University for nearly 20 years—first with the School of the Environment, then with the Center for Environmental Law and Policy, and finally with the Office of Sustainability. 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 vice chair of the external advisory board of the United Nations University Institute for the Advanced Study of Sustainability and represents Yale in the Global Transformation Initiative of the International Alliance of Research Universities. She is also the president of the board of the MEow Cat Lounge in Westbrook, Maine. She earned her Ph.D. and M.S. degrees from Antioch University and her B.F.A. from New York University.