Melanie is an ESRC Future Leaders Fellow at the University of Bristol. Her project, entitled Detention, Deportability and the Family: Migrant Men's Negotiations of the Right to Respect for Family Life, is on the family lives and Article 8 rights of men at risk of deportation.

Her doctoral research was conducted at the University of Oxford, in association with COMPAS and the Institute of Social and Cultural Anthropology. She has also worked as an Associate Research Fellow at the University of Exeter.