Melissa Marselle

Melissa Marselle is a Career Development Research Fellow in the School of Arts & Media at the University of Salford. She works on socially responsible design research projects within the Design Against Crime Solution Centre to apply rigorous social science research and innovative 'design thinking' to deliver human-centred, design-led solutions to societal challenges such as crime and urban wellbeing.

Melissa is also an environmental psychologist focusing on people-environment relationships. She applies a human-centred perspective to multi-disciplinary research projects in order to understand the effect of natural and built environments on people’s well-being and behaviour.

With over 10 years’ academic research experience, Melissa has a strong research record in design against crime, and the use of nature for public health. A few of her previous research projects investigated design-led crime prevention in Manchester City Centre; the evacuation of the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001; and the well-being effects from group walks in nature. Her work to design a safer Manchester city centre was profiled in Wired UK magazine.

Her paper “Examining Group Walks in Nature and Multiple Aspects of Well-being: A large scale study” is the most read article in the journal Ecopsychology.

Her doctoral research was the first national evaluation of the psychological well-being of individuals who take part in Walking for Health group-led health walks. Walking for Health programme is run by Macmillan Cancer Support and The Ramblers.

Melissa is a Chartered Psychologist with the British Psychological Society, and a member of the International Association of Applied Psychologists. She is a visiting researcher at The James Hutton Institute in Aberdeen, Scotland.