Melinda Duncan received her BS in Chemistry from Lafayette College in 1987 and her Ph.D. in Biochemistry from Rutgers University in 1992. Following post-doctoral training at the National Eye Institute, she joined the faculty of the University of Delaware Department of Biological Sciences in 1997. She is currently a professor and Graduate Program Coordinator for that department. Dr. Duncan has authored over 80 scientific papers and her research has been continuously supported by the National Institutes of Health for 18 years. She has trained over 20 graduate students to their terminal degrees and has served on over 70 graduate thesis/dissertation committees. She has served on numerous grant review panels for the NIH, NSF and private foundations, and the editorial boards of the journals Investigative Ophthalmology and Visual Sciences (IOVS), Molecular Vision and PLOS one. She is currently an Associate Editor for IOVS and was appointed a Fellow of the Association of Research in Vision and Ophthalmology in 2015.