Melvin Amos Brannon was born on September 11, 1865, in Lowell, Indiana. He is best known in Beloit as the third president of Beloit College. He became a biologist by training at Wabash College.

In 1894 he went to the University of North Dakota as Professor of Biology, a post he held until 1914. In 1892 he married Lida Converse Lowry. Immediately after returning from the honeymoon, Melvin Brannon began working on his doctorate from the University of Chicago.

In 1912 he received his doctorate from the University of Chicago, summa cum laude and left with the double distinction of election to membership in both Phi Beta Kappa and Sigma XI. In his years at the University of North Dakota, Dr. Brannon organized the School of Medicine in 1905 and served as its Dean from 1905 to 1911; he then served as Dean of the College of Liberal Arts from 1911 until his resignation in 1914.

He left North Dakota to assume the Presidency of the University of Idaho, a post he held from 1914 to 1917, leaving Idaho when called to the Presidency of Beloit College. President Brannon brought both academic scholarship and broad administrative experience to Beloit.

He came to the college at the crisis of America’s entry into World War I and remained to solve the crises of post-war adjustment that faced Beloit and all of American education after 1918. Melvin Brannon had a keen sense of the necessity of relating the College to life.

To this end President Brannon led change in the college: summer school, the quarter system and substantive curricular changes of a semi-professional or pro-vocational nature. A Department of Journalism was instituted as a field of study in Home Economics. Music was expanded.

Melvin Brannon vigorously sought new funding for the college and nearly one million dollars was added to the endowment. From the outset of his administration, Dr. Brannon sought every opportunity to strengthen and extend cordial relations between the city and the college.

Early in 1918 Brannon was invited to become a member of the Businessmen’s Club. He soon envisaged “a larger and more inclusive organization, one which would include all the civic interests of the community with agricultural, commercial industrial and transportation divisions,” a Chamber of Commerce.

Melvin Brannon died in 1950.