Melissa completed her undergraduate degree in Biological Sciences at Stanford University, with honours, distinction and Phi Beta Kappa. She completed her PhD with the National University of Singapore Graduate School for Integrative Sciences and Engineering (NGS) at the Genome Technology and Biology lab of the Genome Institute of Singapore. She was the international winner of the GE and Science prize in 2010, which included giving a talk in Sweden around the time of the Nobel Prize ceremony and won the Phillip Yeo prize (biomedical) in 2011.