Melissa Haendel

Melissa Haendel is the director of precision health and translational informatics and the Sarah Graham Kenan Distinguished Professor at the UNC School of Medicine as well as faculty at the School of Data Science and Society. She is co-founder of the Monarch Initiative and the National Covid Cohort Collaborative. Her background is molecular genetics and developmental biology as well as translational informatics, with a focus over the past decade on open science and semantic engineering. Haendel’s vision is to weave together healthcare systems, basic science research and patient generated data through development of data integration technologies and innovative data capture strategies. Haendel’s research has focused on integration of genotype-phenotype data to improve rare disease diagnosis and mechanism discovery. She also leads and participates in international standards organizations to support improved data sharing and utility worldwide.