Melissa Haendel
Director Of Precision Health & Translational Informatics
Portland, Oregon, United States
Summary
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Senior🎓
Top SchoolMelissa Haendel is a translational informatics leader with 17 years of experience building data integration, semantic and governance frameworks to accelerate precision health and rare disease discovery. As Director of Precision Health & Translational Informatics at UNC and co‑founder of a health startup, she bridges academia, clinical systems, and industry to turn heterogeneous biological and model‑organism data into actionable diagnostics and treatments. Deeply committed to open science and global data standards, she leads cross‑disciplinary initiatives that improve reproducibility, interoperability, and health equity—especially for rural and underserved populations. Trained as a neuroscientist and ontologist, she combines hands‑on curation and semantic engineering with strategic leadership to translate complex stakeholder needs into operational team science. An uncommon strength is her long track record of linking model and non‑model organism data to clinical use, enabling more granular patient stratification through novel multi‑modal and algorithmic approaches.
17 years of coding experience
PhD Neuroscience Anatomy, PhD Neuroscience Anatomy at University of Wisconsin-MadisonB.A. Biology Chemistry, B.A. Biology Chemistry at Reed College
Github Skills (196)
ontology10
semantic-web10
metadata10
transcriptomics10
owl10
genomics10
ontologies10
semantics10
foundry10
open-science10
anatomy10
rdf10
concert10
open-source10
geneontology10
Programming languages (16)
Github contributions (5)
tis-lab/tox-class
Apr 2019 - May 2019
Contributions:49 commits, 49 pushes, 1 comment in 1 month
mellybelly/phenopacket-schema
Apr 2019 - May 2021
Repository for the GA4GH inlined phenopacket schema
Contributions:7 pushes in 2 years
ga4gh
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