Melissa Haendel

Melissa Haendel is the Director of Precision Health & Translational Informatics and the Sarah Graham Kenan Distinguished Professor in the Department of Genetics at The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and 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. Dr. 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. Dr. 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.