Staff Spotlight: Melanie Gilreath Chaisson.
Collaborative work is key to developing sustainable public health solutions and improving population health outcomes. This weekly series spotlights one SPH staff member who advances public health through collaborations within the field and across sectors.
What are your main priorities and responsibilities as budget and financial analyst at SPH?
In the Finance Office, we tend to cover a little bit of everything: on any given day, I may spend time tackling financial, HR, or student employment projects. My top priorities are supporting departments with understanding their budgets and spending, and ensuring that financial transactions are administered according to BU guidelines; ultimately, these contribute to keeping the school on track for financial success. To accomplish these priorities, I am frequently involved in training and assisting staff with financial processes such as purchasing, Concur, journal entries, and account reconciliation. Some of my other responsibilities include analyzing salary and operating expenses for agreement with the budget, hiring teaching assistants and student employees, and writing standard operating procedures for a variety of transactions.
Can you discuss how collaborative work is integral to your role, and what are one or two collaborations that have been most meaningful to you?
I would say that the vast majority of the work we do in the Finance Office is collaborative; we often work closely with administrative staff to support SPH academic departments, centers, and central offices. I enjoy collaborating with our department directors, as they often have knowledge to share and I can always learn something new. Whether we are working together on a quick question, or attempting to untangle a messy knot, teamwork is often essential to achieve the final result.
A recent collaboration that I helped manage has been standardizing the hiring of teaching assistants each semester. This has been a joint effort between the Education Office, academic departments, and the Finance Office. I have worked with the Education Office and academic program administrators to develop an online form for each department to submit its TA payment requests. While these changes may not be evident to the TAs or faculty, we have been successful with creating efficiencies in hiring and managing payments of our teaching support staff. As any changes may arise each semester (such as additional hiring approvals required for summer 2020 TAs, due to COVID-19), we are all able to work together quickly and effectively to modify the hiring process as needed.
Another ongoing collaboration that I have enjoyed has been with the BUMC Office of Student Financial Services (OSFS). We have worked closely with the OSFS team over the past year and a half to streamline processes for managing scholarships, stipends, and other student accounting items. This has resulted in more efficient processes for updating student accounts, a new form for requesting non-service stipends, and we now have a greater understanding of the overall student accounting system and how to make it work best for our needs. I find there is great value in collaborating with others, both within SPH, the larger BU community, and beyond.
“Melanie is certainly one of our best-kept secrets here at SPH. Over the past 12 months, we have gone through many changes at our office, making this year a challenging one. Through these difficult times, late nights and tight deadlines, Melanie truly revealed her exceptional commitment to the School of Public Health. In assisting faculty, students and staff, Melanie is always helpful, thorough, and extremely kind. Melanie has helped put together a large number of well-prepared Best Practices guidance and Standard Operating Procedures that are now used by many SPH departments to simplify their administrative burden even further. Melanie’s relentless hard work and dedication has earned her a well-deserved promotion, not only because she is extremely good at what she does, but because her enthusiasm and passion to make the school a better place has inspired all of us around her to give our very best as well.”
Veronica Byam, director of finance