Melissa Haendel
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Melissa Anne Haendel | |
|---|---|
 Haendel in 2020 | |
| Alma mater | Reed College University of Wisconsin–Madison |
| Known for | Bioinformatics |
| Scientific career | |
| Institutions | Anschutz Medical Campus Oregon Health & Science University Oregon State University |
| Thesis | Identification and characterization of the novel gene, axotrophin, using an in vitro gene trap preselection method (1999) |
Melissa Anne Haendel is an American bioinformaticist who is the Sarah Graham Kenan Distinguished Professor at the UNC School of Medicine.[1] She is also the Director of Precision Health & Translational Informatics, deputy director of Computational Science at The North Carolina Translational and Clinical Sciences Institute. She serves as Director of the Center for Data to Health (CD2H). Her research makes use of data to improve the discovery and diagnosis of diseases. During the COVID-19 pandemic, Haendel joined with the National Institutes of Health to launch the National COVID Cohort Collaborative (N3C), which looks to identify the risk factors that can predict severity of disease outcome and help to identify treatments.
Haendel earned her undergraduate degree in chemistry at Reed College.[2] Her undergraduate dissertation looked at designing pharmaceuticals using molecular electrostatic potentials (MEPs) to construct quantitative structure-activity relationships.[3] She moved to the University of Wisconsin–Madison for her graduate studies, where she used in vitro gene trapping to study the gene axotrophin.[4] Her early career focussed on genetics and molecular biology.[5] In 2000 she moved to the University of Oregon as a postdoctoral researcher studying the role of thyroid hormones in the neural development of zebrafish.
