Her PhD and postdoctoral work is in neuroscience, focusing on early development and cell biology. Later she joined the Zebrafish model organism database, where she became interested in data integration and semantic engineering in support of disease discovery. She participates in the development of a number of data standards in support of biomedical data sharing, reuse, and collaboration, as well as efforts to support scientific reproducibility and new modes of attribution. Melissa tweets at @ontowonka.