Melanie Sands, an ERG senior social scientist and project manager, has over 15 years of experience providing economic, public health, and resilience expertise to clients and stakeholders at local, tribal, state, and federal levels. Throughout her career, she has worked closely with a range of clients, including those at the Food and Drug Administration, National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, National Institute for Standards and Technology, and State of Vermont. She specializes in program and process evaluations, economic valuation studies, policy development and analysis, survey development and implementation, and facilitation of stakeholder meetings and interviews. 

Melanie has led and supported numerous survey efforts during her time at ERG and is experienced with completing each step in the survey design and implementation process. She is adept at developing sample frames, sampling methodologies, and multimodal questionnaires that elicit key information from respondents. She has overseen complex data collections that include multiple partners and languages and is seasoned at developing approaches for increasing respondent participation to achieve survey response goals. In one example, Melanie led a survey project for the National Institute for Standards and Technology in Puerto Rico to better understand the recovery trajectories of hospitals and schools from Hurricane Maria. This project required a mixture of phone and in-person surveys, conducted in Spanish and English, of people in 65 hospitals and 1,465 schools. Melanie managed the utilization of data collectors from Albizu University and call center staff through Logit | i+a to successfully complete these surveys despite the COVID-19 pandemic and the multiple natural disasters that occurred during the data collection period.

Melanie has extensive experience engaging communities, state and federal agencies, non-profit organizations, industry experts, academia, and the public through structured and semi-structured interviews, focus groups, listening sessions, and meetings conducted online and in-person. As a trained facilitator through the Essential Facilitation^TM  program, she excels at creating and implementing engagement opportunities that achieve client needs while staying attuned to the individuals at the center of the engagement. She has worked with hard-to-reach populations including coal miners, underserved communities in rural areas, Alaskan natives, and hospital and school administrators in disaster recovery zones. 

Melanie holds a B.A. in environmental studies from Bethany College and an M.A. in environmental science and policy from Clark University. Outside work, she is an avid trail runner and an active member of the Vermont Medical Reserve Corps.