Melanie Mitchell received a a Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Michigan in 1990. Her dissertation work with Douglas Hofstadter was on cognitive modeling of high-level perception and analogy-making. In 1990 she was awarded a Junior Fellowship in the University of Michigan Society of Fellows, with a joint appointment as an Assistant Professor in the Electrical Engineering and Computer Science Department at the University of Michigan. From 1992-1999 she directed the Adaptive Computation program at the Santa Fe Institute. In 1999 she spent a year in the Biophysics group at Los Alamos National Laboratory. She is currently a staff member at the Santa Fe Institute.

Her research is on intelligent systems and machine learning, evolutionary computation and artificial life, decentralized parallel computation in spatially extended systems such as cellular automata, and more generally, on understanding how natural systems perform computation, and how to use ideas from natural systems to develop new kinds of computational systems. She also works in the field of cognitive science, particularly computer modeling of perception and analogy-making, emergent computation and representation, and philosophical foundations of cognitive science.

She is the author of Analogy-Making as Perception (MIT Press, 1993) and An Introduction to Genetic Algorithms (MIT Press, 1996). She is the co-editor of Adaptive Individuals in Evolving Populations: Models and Algorithms (Addison Wesley, 1996). She is also the author of over 50 research papers in the fields of machine intelligence, cognitive science, and complex systems.