Human Sciences senior invests in military families, rural communities

Auburn senior Melissa Garnes was 9 years old when she moved with her military family from Germany to Fort Benning, Georgia. She was ecstatic when they visited the university for a self-guided tour and a football game.

“It was surreal. It was like nothing I’d ever experienced before,” Garnes said. “Even at the highest, cheapest seats you could possibly get — everything is still just so right there in your face. You feel like you’re on the field and part of this community and family.”

It’s a feeling she could not forget — not through multiple hardships, including relocations across the world and chronic illness diagnoses. About a decade after her campus visit, Garnes enrolled as a human development and family science major, where she has excelled, receiving the 2025 College of Human Sciences Student Excellence Award and the Best Undergraduate Poster Award for the college at the Research Symposium in 2024.

Sharing research with military families

Soon after arriving on the Plains, Garnes hoped to help military families and connected with Military REACH, a research initiative led by Professor Mallory Lucier-Greer.

“Our team is focused on the development and dissemination of family science research pertaining to the health and well-being of military families,” Lucier-Greer said. “All reports are requested by and sent to the Department of Defense’s Office of Military Community and Family Policy to use in policy development and revision.”

Garnes dove right into Military REACH’s impactful work. She collaborated with the team to review definitions on its website, create social media posts, draft articles on wide-ranging research topics and translate relevant research into lay-friendly summaries.

“Military REACH opened my eyes to a lot of things that I wasn’t aware of — just being a military child, sometimes it can be hard to see past your own experiences,” Garnes said. “It really expanded my understanding of what families like mine are experiencing.”

It wasn’t long until Garnes caught the research bug and sought to guide a study of her own. Lucier-Greer — struck by Garnes’ eagerness to learn, ability to work hard and self-motivation — encouraged her to apply for an Undergraduate Research Fellowship.

Her research study focused on military sexual trauma, which is an understudied and prevalent experience impacting approximately one in three veteran women and one in 50 veteran men during service, according to Lucier-Greer.

Working closely with both Lucier-Greer and postdoctoral research fellow Erin Cooper, Garnes found that there was not a significant difference between men and women’s reported levels of anxiety and depression after experiencing military sexual trauma. Their findings also showed military trauma survivors who received mental health support had fewer symptoms of depression and anxiety than those who did not receive this support.

Garnes published her work in Auburn’s “Journal of Undergraduate Scholarship” and presented this research at the Research Symposium and the National Conference on Undergraduate Research in California last year.

“One of the most impactful conversations I had [while presenting my research] was with a service member who came up to me and told me he never expected to see this,” Garnes said. “He said ‘Thank you; this is a problem, and this is something we need to talk about.’”

Presenting research for the first time can be intimidating, but Garnes said her team of mentors and colleagues helped her along the way. Throughout her time at Auburn, she cultivated these relationships in a quality over quantity approach.

“It’s been really nice to find people here who were incredibly supportive and believed in me every step of the way,” Garnes said.

Caring for rural communities

Garnes has soaked up all her experiences on campus and beyond. In summer 2024, she spent four weeks working in hospitals in Cape Town, South Africa, an experience that piqued her interest in helping people closer to home.

Since January, she’s been an intern with the Rural Health Initiative — a collaborative effort to connect rural Alabamians to health care. Garnes has assisted the team in bringing virtual health care across the state through telehealth technology and community-centered health programming. Linda Gibson-Young, professor and outreach coordinator in the College of Nursing, said Garnes excelled at outreach efforts during her internship. 

“Melissa's role benefits rural communities by strengthening local connections and supporting community-centered health initiatives to improve overall child and family well-being,” she said.

Lucier-Greer said one of Garnes’ many strengths is her ability to use her classroom experience in applied settings, including outreach and research. Garnes credits faculty in Human Sciences for giving her a strong foundation.

“The faculty do a really great job of making you feel understood in your personal beliefs and experiences, while also expanding your understanding,” she said.

After graduating, Garnes plans to enter a Master of Public Health program focused on child and maternal health, where she can continue honing her research skills and helping the community.

“Auburn has been a fantastic place for me to grow. I’ve really been able to learn a lot and take what I’m learning and apply it to my day-to-day life,” she said. “I hope to take the sense of community Auburn has given me and expand it to wherever I decide to go.”