Melissa Murphy is an award-winning teacher and scholar at The University of Texas at Austin and is the founder and chief communication coach of The Pitch Academy.

Murphy currently teaches business communication, negotiation, and entrepreneurship courses for undergraduate and graduate students at Texas McCombs School of Business. She has taught professional communication skills, nonverbal communication, and organizational communication for the Moody College of Communication and has also held academic teaching positions in the Master of Science in Technology Commercialization program since 2012. She also teaches numerous workshops for Texas Executive Education.

Murphy has published work on web conferencing in the classroom, international crisis communication, interviewing, communication pedagogy, health communication, and professionalism for students and recent college graduates. Her latest work investigates the role of storytelling in raising capital in rewards and equity-based crowdfunding campaigns – which was recently highlighted in a Harvard Business Review article. During the past decade, she has worked and provided training for nonprofit organizations and companies in fields such as technology, education, consumer products, health care, finance, insurance, and government.

Murphy holds a B.A. degree in corporate communication from The University of Cincinnati, and an M.A. and Ph.D. in organizational communication and technology from UT, where she received multiple fellowships including the High North Fellowship at the Bodø Graduate School of Business at The University of Nordland. Prior to her appointment at UT, she lived in Los Angeles and worked in the music industry, holding positions in digital sales and marketing – where she met Taylor Swift – not once, but twice.

Recognized by the Speech Communication Association as the Most Outstanding Graduate Teacher in the State of Texas, she was awarded Assistant Instructor of the Year by the Department of Communication Studies during her time at the Moody College of Communication. She is a three-time winner of the Faculty Honor Roll Award at Texas McCombs, which recognizes the top 20 undergraduate faculty members in the college for their success in the classroom. She is also a two-time recipient of the Amplify Award for Diversity and Inclusion, which recognizes faculty members who foster highly inclusive classrooms and help students participate and improve learning outcomes.

In 2019, Murphy was selected as one of three professors on campus to teach in the Kendra Scott Women’s Entrepreneurial Leadership Institute, where she launched the first-ever consumer products practicum and was awarded the inaugural Faculty Fellowship. In 2020, she helped launched the first chapter in Texas of The Women’s Network at The University of Texas, dedicated to helping women succeed professionally. In 2021, she helped her students launch the Texas chapter of Epsilon Nu Tau, the nation’s first entrepreneurship fraternity. In 2022, she became the faculty sponsor for Texas Momentum, the fastest growing student-led accelerator on the Forty Acres.

Most recently, Murphy was elected to serve as part of the Department of Management’s Executive Committee to represent the voice of the department’s teaching faculty, and she was chosen as the faculty director for Women Who Mean Business, an executive education program taught by Texas McCombs Advisory Board Hall of Fame alumna. In her biggest leadership role to date, Murphy was appointed director of Undergraduate Entrepreneurship, a program ranked No. 2 in the nation by The Princeton Review. In this role, she oversees the Entrepreneurship Minor – one of the fastest growing academic programs on campus – the Harkey Institute for Undergraduate Entrepreneurial Studies, and the Kendra Scott Women’s Entrepreneurial Leadership Institute.