Jessica Melton (MHA Chief Operating Officer, Sentara Norfolk General Hospital) and Doug Melton, PhD (Head of Clinical and Customer Analytics, Cigna)
UNC Gillings graduates Doug and Jessica Melton create a scholarship endowment to promote healthcare leadership opportunities for women and minorities.
In their day jobs, UNC Gillings graduates Doug and Jessica Melton are working to improve health in different ways: Jess as chief operating officer at Sentara Norfolk General Hospital and Doug as the head of Clinical and Customer Analytics at Cigna.
Through a new scholarship endowment they created in the Department of Health Policy and Management, they hope to provide future Gillings students, especially women and minorities, with the support to pursue similar opportunities in health-care leadership.
“We were impressed by the Department’s inclusiveness and commitment to improving diversity and the health of vulnerable populations locally and globally,” said Jess Melton, BSBIO ’04, MHA ’07, CERT ’07.
Attending a conference, Jess learned about a study finding that as leadership levels of health-care administration increased, the diversity of those in leadership dropped sharply. Another study found that increasing “diversity in leadership and governance” could significantly improve health-care equity. These studies helped inspire the endowment’s goal of advancing leadership opportunities for women and minorities.
It was this type of support that helped both Jess and Doug as undergraduates. They participated in the Research Education Support program, funded largely by the National Institute of Health and the National Science Foundation to support minority students working toward degrees in STEM-related fields.
The RES program first exposed Doug, (BA ’04, PhD ’10) to public health as an academic and career possibility. “Had I not been in that program, I would not be working in corporate health analytics,” he says. “We worked full-time so we got paid to learn about science, and we had a lot of support and encouragement. We are doing this now because someone did it for us.”
As part of RES, Jess did field work in eastern North Carolina with the late Dr. Steven Bennett Wing, associate professor of epidemiology. Then, her first day of graduate school, Hurricane Katrina hit.
“It almost spoke to me: ‘You love health care and you love planning and anticipating the health-care needs of vulnerable populations.’ I knew health-care administration was the career for me,” she says.
The couple — parents to 5-year-old twins — named their endowment the Melton Family Scholarship Endowment to honor Doug’s father, the late Dr. Larry Douglas Melton, who dedicated substantial time and resources to promoting educational and professional development opportunities for minorities throughout North Carolina.
“We wanted to do something substantial to give back and further our commitment to improving health care,” Jess says, “and create a lasting legacy for our family.”
