Biography
Melesa Poole earned a B.S. in Business Administration, with concentrations in Accounting and Computer Science from Concord University, graduating Summa Cum Laude. She attended Virginia Tech, where she completed a Master’s of Accountancy with an emphasis in Information Systems. Before pursuing her Ph.D., Dr. Poole was a CPA in private practice in West Virginia, specializing in home health care. She prepared financial statements and Medicare/ Medicaid cost reports for home health care agencies, as well as income taxes for individuals. She also performed accounting and information systems consulting services. She then completed a Ph.D. in Business Accounting Information Systems, with a research focus in Human Information Processing.
Dr. Poole worked in industry as a senior software engineer for fourteen years where she served as a systems engineer, developer, and business analyst in the Special Projects department of Comverse, Inc. (formerly Kenan Systems, Lucent Technologies, and CSG Systems.) She was involved in the development, design, and testing of internal human resource and accounting applications and an external budgeting system for the US Postal Service. Most recently, she worked for The Babcock and Wilcox Company (Lynchburg, Virginia) in its Nuclear Operations Group where she developed software applications for quality control.
Dr. Poole was hired as an assistant professor of Information Systems at Liberty, where she served as both the chair of the Computing Department in the School of Engineering and Computational Sciences and as the chair of the Business Management Information Systems department in the School of Business. Dr. Poole is now an associate professor of Computational Sciences in the School of Business where she also serves as a senator and committee member for the Undergraduate Faculty Senate.
Dr. Poole’s research interests include human factors in information systems and human cognition. Her focus is behavioral and largely involves Decision Theory. During her time in industry, she published an article in Decision Sciences that examined the effects of various moderators on the Social Cognitive Model as applied to computer training. Her current research interests include online education, Autism Spectrum Disorders, and human information processing strategies in information systems design. She is a member of the AICPA (American Institute of Certified Public Accountants) and the Association for Information Systems where she has served for four years as a reviewer for conference papers for the Human-Computer Interaction special interest group.
Dr. Poole has a passion for teaching and service. She served as a Children’s’ Sunday School teacher for seven years before coming to Liberty and is currently involved in the Meals Ministry at her church. She is married to Henry “Clay” Poole, a network engineer and former Marine sergeant. Her son, David Bolt, is an adept writer and attends Liberty University.