Dr. Mela Wyeth, a 20-year member of the CSU faculty, is the 2020 SCICU Excellence in Teaching honoree for Charleston Southern University. She is a professor of business administration and finance in the CSU College of Business. Dr. Wyeth holds graduate and professional degrees in business and finance, including a Ph.D. in economics from STI Social-Technical Institute (Moscow, Russia), an M.A. in finance and an MBA, both from the University of Vienna (Austria). She earned a B.A. in Soviet and East European affairs from the University of Michigan.

Although she is a native of Detroit, Michigan, Dr. Wyeth has spent most of her adult and professional life outside the United States. Prior to joining the Charleston Southern faculty in 2000 , Dr. Wyeth was a visiting Professor at the Moscow Institute for Law, Economics and Political Science in the Russian Republic. Her areas of assigned teaching responsibilities include graduate and undergraduate business finance, financial statement analysis, and quantitative methodologies. Her academic career was preceded by 20 years in international private sector engineering and US Foreign Service. During that time, she was a member of the US-Russian Business Council in Washington DC and Moscow. She is currently active in the World Affairs Council of Charleston and regularly serves as a Great Decisions docent and host.

Dr. Wyeth is especially drawn to the challenges of the on-line teaching environment and tailors innovative video instructional materials and video conferencing to the needs of off-campus populations. When she finds students are struggling with a particular concept, she creates online videos to enhance their understanding.