Melissa Haendel

Haendel earned her undergraduate degree in chemistry at Reed College.[1] Her undergraduate dissertation looked at designing pharmaceuticals using molecular electrostatic potentials (MEPs) to construct quantitative structure-activity relationships.[2] She moved to the University of Wisconsin–Madison for her graduate studies, where she used in vitro gene trapping to study the gene axotrophin.[3] Her early career focussed on genetics and molecular biology.[4] 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.

Haendel started working in healthcare informatics in 2004.[4] She switched the focus of her research from neuroscience and the biology of zebrafish to the development of resources for the Oregon Health & Science University library. She was promoted to Associate Professor of Medical Informatics in 2015.

Hanedel's research considers ontology development, biocuration and data harmonsation.[4] Biocuration assembles information from patient records, research outputs and medical literature to create a quality-controlled, computable format.[4] She is Director of Translational Data Science at the Linus Pauling Institute.[5]

Haendel believes that a globally consistent set of criteria, more comprehensive data collection, sharing and analysis will help to diagnose rare diseases.[6] Rare diseases are thought to impact 10% of the global population, meaning that there are considerable numbers of patients who are underserved by their healthcare systems.[7] In 2019, Haendel and the CD2H were awarded almost $9 million to make data related to cancer research more centralised and organised.[8] The Center for Cancer Data Harmonization makes use of a cloud-based portal to share data between physicians and cancer researchers across the country.[9]

During the COVID-19 pandemic, the United States had no standardised means to collect and share clinical data.[10][11] Haendel was concerned that the number of deaths and infections were not being accurately counted, and that this might compromise safe reopening.[12] In June 2020, Haendel formed the National COVID Cohort Collaborative (N3C),[13] which collates and analyses the medical record data of people with coronavirus disease.[14] The N3C looks to identify the risk factors that can predict severity of coronavirus disease and help to identify potential treatments.[14] It has work streams in data partnership, phenotypes, collaborative analytics, data harmonisation and data synthesis.

• Mungall, Christopher J; Torniai, Carlo; Gkoutos, Georgios V; Lewis, Suzanna E; Haendel, Melissa A (2012). "Uberon, an integrative multi-species anatomy ontology". Genome Biology. 13 (1): R5. doi:10.1186/gb-2012-13-1-r5. ISSN 1465-6906. PMC 3334586. PMID 22293552. S2CID 15453742.
• Day-Richter, J.; Harris, M. A.; Haendel, M.; Lewis, S. (2007-06-01). "OBO-Edit an ontology editor for biologists". Bioinformatics. 23 (16): 2198–2200. doi:10.1093/bioinformatics/btm112. ISSN 1367-4803. PMID 17545183.
• Shimoyama, Mary; Dwinell, Melinda; Jacob, Howard (2009-08-05). "Multiple Ontologies for Integrating Complex Phenotype Datasets". Nature Precedings. doi:10.1038/npre.2009.3554. ISSN 1756-0357. Missing |author2= (help)