Melissa Scardaville

Melissa Scardaville is a principal researcher and mixed-methods sociologist responsible for directing innovative behavioral science projects and tasks to understand others' experiences and behaviors. She is a subject matter expert in violence prevention and has worked with diverse populations on adopting upstream prevention activities.

Since 2019, Dr. Scardaville has worked with the Department of Defense (DoD) to build their workforce's capacity to adopt the public health approach to preventing harmful behaviors. She served as team lead for DoD's 60-hour SPARX Knowledge training for two years, overseeing and scaling up all training activities from the pilot to full-scale implementation. In 2024, Dr. Scardaville was appointed as a Special Government Employee to the Department of Veterans Affairs Subcommittee on Women's Health to provide strategic direction on research policy.

Previously, Dr. Scardaville was project director for a Centers for the Disease Control and Prevention (CDC)-funded study on developing new ways to measure intimate partner violence. She is also coauthor of Intimate Coercion: Recognition and Recovery, which uses case studies to explore sexual and domestic abuse. Dr. Scardaville has led numerous large-scale qualitative studies, including a groundbreaking effort for the National Center for Education Statistics on understanding drivers to survey nonresponse and a multi-state case study for the CDC on community resilience after disasters.