Melany Dickens-Ray
Chief of Staff, Associate Vice President for Research and Partnerships
Telephone: 405-325-5208
Email: mdickens@ou.edu
Melany is the Associate Vice President for Research and Partnerships and is Tomas’ Chief of Staff. Melany has been at the university for 31 years and in her current position as Associate VPR for the past 10 years, but her position has changed and grown in the past eight months since Tomas arrived. She earned both her bachelor’s and master's degrees at OU, and spent 10 years post graduate school working as a Research Associate with several faculty in the areas of Physical Geography, Environmental Science, and Plant Biology. Her area of research expertise is interpreting and analyzing satellite remotely sensed data related to categorizing and identifying vegetation coverage in Oklahoma.
Melany’s duties and tasks are related to managing projects for the OVPRP, and she works closely with faculty all over the Norman campus to design and implement the creation or renovation of lab space. Working closely with faculty also gives her knowledge about the condition and amount of research space in use on the Norman campus, and this initiated an indepth research space inventory that is now conducted on an annual basis. Melany also supervises the VPRP Administrative Staff.
