Melissa Riley holds a B.Sc. degree in Natural Resources: Conservation Biology from the University of Arizona, which she earned shortly before her temporary relocation to Italy in 2017. She is passionate about nature and conservation, and contributed to various conservation projects involving animals such as elephants, bighorn sheep, red squirrels, and hummingbirds. She has been collaborating with Dolphin Biology and Conservation since 2018, devoting a lot of time to the management of digital photo catalogs of striped dolphins from the Gulf of Corinth, Greece, and common bottlenose dolphins from the north-western Adriatic Sea, Italy. Melissa has lovingly matched and identified (mostly correctly) over 50,000 dorsal fin photos of either dolphin species. She is currently a MSc student at Black Hills State University, South Dakota, with a thesis focusing on genetic variation in American dippers.