Melody Sandells studied Physics (MSci) at Imperial College, London before undertaking her PhD at the University of Reading on Modelling the Impact of Vegetation on the Seasonal Snowcover, which involved a four month field experiment in the Owyhee Mountains of Idaho. She moved on to study the densification of snow at the Centre for Polar Observation and Modelling in University College London. Later, she returned to the University of Reading as a member of the European Space Agency Expert Scientific Laboratory for the SMOS mission. Since then, Mel has dedicated her research to understanding how to improve global observations of snow mass, visiting the Canadian sub-Arctic, and Nordic Arctic along the way.