Melissa Petty received her BA in Mathematics from Millsaps College in Jackson, MS (1993), and her MS (1996) and PhD (1999) in Mathematics from the University of Colorado, Boulder. She began working at the National Center for Atmospheric Research in the Research Applications Program (currently known as the Research Applications Laboratory) in 1997 as a software developer, where she contributed to the implementation and operation of meteorological algorithms used in diagnosing and forecasting weather phenomena. She transitioned from scientific application development to business application development when she left NCAR in 2001 to work for SAP Labs, LLC, where she served as an application developer and team lead in the realm of Public Sector HR and procurement applications. She returned to scientific application development when she joined CIRA in 2005 as a member of an engineering team within the Forecast Verification Section of the Aviation Branch of ESRL's Global Systems Division. She is currently working on the engineering effort towards a real-time, operational system to support the Network Enabled Verification Service, which will facilitate the integration of data to support verification analysis within a user-specific context.