Prior to joining the University of Tasmania, to coordinate postgraduate courses, Melanie was a Nurse Educator in the Department of Critical Care Medicine at the Royal Hobart Hospital. She played a lead role in establishing the Medical Emergency Team system for recognising and responding to physiological deterioration in ward patients. Melanie has worked in critical care units in the United Kingdom and has undertaken postgraduate studies in neuroscience nursing at the Wessex Neurological Centre, University Hospital Southampton, a large tertiary referral centre for Southern England and the Channel Islands during this time.

Melanie's research into identifying solutions to real world problems aligns to the University's theme of Better Health. Her research interests include understanding how nurses take, record and action vital signs in acute hospital wards. She adopts a critical realist approach into understanding the reasons behind the choices people take when making decisions. Extending beyond this, Melanie is also researching into the choices youths take when making risky decisions. Youths attending the Prevent Alcohol and Risk Related Trauma in Youths (P.A.R.T.Y. Hobart), a one day program intended to explore choice and consequences, is the setting for a research study aligned to a common problem that affects the community. The aim is to reduce the over representation of youth in Tasmania's trauma statistics.