Office of Scholar Development Staff
- Assistant Director
- melinda.grimsley@wku.edu
- HCIC 1041
- Pronouns: She/Her
- Primary Responsibilities: strategic planning, campus partnerships, outreach and recruitment, advising support
Dr. Grimsley is in HCIC 1041 (inside the Mahurin Honors College suite). To schedule a meeting, click here!
Melinda Grimsley leads the Office of Scholar Development, coordinating strategic efforts to more effectively and efficiently help WKU students and alumni make more possible.
Dr. Grimsley earned a Ph.D. in history from the University of Notre Dame, where she studied the development and function of the nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Irish lunacy inspectorate and local government, as well as the professionalization of Irish psychiatry. At Notre Dame, she received a Presidential Fellowship, a pre-doctoral teaching fellowship from the Keough-Naughton Institute for Irish Studies, and several smaller grants to fund research in Dublin, Cork, and Co. Tipperary, Ireland, and Belfast, Northern Ireland.
In the work of OSD, she thinks of students' experiences and skills the same way she learned to think of historical sources: as an endless variety of pieces of evidence we can interpret for readers (and ourselves) in a compelling, seamless narrative. She believes that we are the stories we tell ourselves; the storytelling we practice in applications is one of the most powerful tools we have for professional and personal development.
Dr. Grimsley grew up on a farm in Utica, Kentucky and is the mom of two weird and wonderful girls. When she's not at a track, cross country, or gymnastics meet or working in the wine shop she owns with her husband, she can (not) be found running very long distances in the woods.