Melissa Hill is a PhD candidate in the Communication Sciences & Disorders at the University of Iowa. She joined the PhD program in Fall 2023. She earned a BA in Linguistics and East Asian Studies and a certificate in TESOL from the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 2019. She later earned a MS in Speech-Language Pathology from Rush University in 2023.

She works with her mentor, Stewart McCauley, in the Language, Learning, and Memory Lab. Her research focuses on linguistic complexity in grade-school academic texts and reading comprehension assessments used by speech-language pathologists and educators. 

In her free time, she enjoys cooking, playing with her cats, and studying foreign languages.