Our Team

Melissa is from the metro Atlanta area but moved to North Carolina to attend college at Queens University of Charlotte, where she studied Nursing and Spanish and quickly fell in love with the beauty of North Carolina’s people and landscape. After working as a nursing assistant and then nurse in Labor and Delivery at Carolinas Medical Center in Charlotte, she wanted to do more for the families of her community, so she went to graduate school at Frontier Nursing University, where she completed her master’s degree in nurse-midwifery in 2011. 

After urban public health work and then full-scope midwifery providing collaborative care with OB/GYNs at a small community hospital, she moved to Asheville in 2017 to work as a nurse-midwife at the WNC Birth Center. Melissa resonated with the passion and hard work of the local perinatal health community to improve options and outcomes for birthing families and felt inspired by the magic that resulted from that collaboration across professions and care models. 

After the disheartening closure of the WNC Birth Center largely due to insurance reimbursement obstacles within our current healthcare system, Melissa is excited to join the innovative model of Direct Patient Care provided at Lantern Health. She strives to find new ways to provide the quality care families deserve while overcoming those systemic obstacles posed by the traditional insurance reimbursement models. As a certified nurse-midwife, Melissa will be providing prenatal, birth, and postpartum care alongside Dr. Rachel Hines.  She is also able to help with newborn care, breastfeeding support, preconception care, family planning and contraception, routine gynecologic care, and wellness promotion.