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. Her background is in molecular genetics and translational informatics. Dr. Haendel’s vision is to weave together health care systems, basic science research, and patient-generated data through the 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 has contributed to international standards organizations worldwide; in particular the Mondo disease ontology, which reconciles and classifies global genetic and rare disease knowledge.