New faculty join UMMC academic ranks
Medical Center leadership is proud to announce the following additions to its faculty and leadership staff.
Melanie B. Gates
Melanie B. Gates has joined the Medical Center faculty as an instructor of dental hygiene in the School of Dentistry.
Gates, who is board-certified, completed two years at Louisiana Tech University in Rushton before earning her BS in dental hygiene in 2004 from the University of Louisiana Monroe.
She worked as a dental hygienist for John Henson, DMD, in Ridgeland for 18 years and for Goolsby Family Dentistry in Clinton.
Among her honors is the Louisiana Dental Hygienists’ Outstanding Student Award in 2004. She has served as president of the Student American Dental Hygienists' Association.
Her skills include oral prophylaxis, dental radiography, scaling, root planning, oral cancer screening and more.
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Dr. Manju George
Dr. Manju George, the scientific director for Paltown Development Foundation, which supports COLONTOWN, the online colorectal cancer patient and caregiver support and education community, has joined the Medical Center as an assistant professor of population health science in the John D. Bower School of Population Health.
George earned a Bachelor of Veterinary Science and Animal Husbandry at the College of Veterinary and Animal Sciences, Mannuthy, Kerala, India, before entering the Indian Veterinary Research Institute in Izatnagar, Bareilly, India, where she received her Master of Veterinary Science, followed by her PhD in 2000, in veterinary virology. She then completed four years of post-doctoral training in cell biology at Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois.
She has held various positions and appointments at institutions including the Center for Cellular and Molecular Biology in Hyderabad, India; the Division of Radiation Oncology at the ENH Research Institute in Evanston, Illinois; the Eppley Institute for Cancer and Allied Diseases at the University of Nebraska Medical Center in Omaha; the Institutional Animal Care and Use Committee at UNMC; and the Colorectal Cancer Alliance.
George has participated in a number of scientific meetings, conferences and panel discussions on colorectal cancer care, precision oncology, cancer drug development and other topics. She has a variety of abstracts, posters, news articles, invited talks and honors to her credit, as well as research papers based on her role as a colorectal cancer patient advocate.
She is also the coauthor of several scientific research publications. She is a patient advocate at the National Cancer Institute Rectal Anal Task Force, the Cancer Grand Challenge PROSPECT project and the ARPA-H ASCEND-CRC project, in addition to being a patient advocate faculty at the AACR/ASCO Methods in Clinical Cancer research workshop.
As the chair of the Mississippi Colorectal Cancer Roundtable, she will expand her patient advocacy work to include colorectal cancer screening and focus her efforts to work with relevant community stakeholders to improve colorectal cancer screening rates in the state.
She hopes that her participation at the MCCTR Community Engaged Research Summer Institute in Hattiesburg will give her the necessary exposure and access to resources that can help her in her work in this area.
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Shae N. Miller
Shae N. Miller, recently an MRI technologist at the University of Mississippi Medical Center, has joined the Medical Center faculty as an assistant professor of radiologic sciences in the School of Health Related Professions.
At UMMC, Miller completed her Bachelor of Science in Radiologic Sciences before earning her Master of Science in Magnetic Resonance Imaging in 2023. Before joining UMMC, she worked as a student MRI technologist at St. Dominic Hospital in Jackson.
Miller, who is certified in magnetic resonance imaging and radiography, has earned a number of scholastic honors and is the coauthor of the scientific report, “Post-Mortem Pediatric MRI.” She has also conducted research studies for UMMC’s Memory Impairment and Neurodegenerative Dementia (MIND) Center.