Melissa Anne Haendel is an American bioinformaticist who is the Sarah Graham Kenan Distinguished Professor at the UNC School of Medicine.

[2] Her undergraduate dissertation looked at designing pharmaceuticals using molecular electrostatic potentials (MEPs) to construct quantitative structure-activity relationships.

[7] Haendel believes that a globally consistent set of criteria, more comprehensive data collection, sharing and analysis will help to diagnose rare diseases.

[8] 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.

[14] In June 2020, Haendel formed the National COVID Cohort Collaborative (N3C),[15] which collates and analyses the medical record data of people with coronavirus disease.