	Melrose received in 1974 his Ph.D. from Cambridge University under F. Gerard Friedlander with thesis "Initial and Initial-Boundary Value Problems". He then became a research fellow at St John’s College, Cambridge. In 1977 he was a visiting scholar at the Institute for Advanced Study. Since 1976 he has been a professor at MIT, where since 2006 he has been the Simons Professor of Mathematics. From 1999 to 2002 he was the chair of the committee for pure mathematics at MIT.