Melissa Bailar, PhD is the Executive Director of the Medical Humanities Research Institute (MHRI) and Senior Lecturer and Associate Director of the Medical Humanities Program at Rice University. In these roles, she forms strategic research and educational partnerships among students, postdoctoral fellows, academic faculty, the Texas Medical Center, and community organizations related to health. Previously, she was Director of Grants and Initiatives in the Humanities Research Center at Rice. In these roles, Bailar has served as an author/co-author and principal investigator /co-PI on multiple programmatic grants from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the American Council of Learned Societies. 

Bailar has been teaching in the Medical Humanities Program since its founding in 2016 and serves as an advisor for the Minor in Medical Humanities. She regularly teaches in the research practicum component required for the minor, and has developed an extensive network of clinical researchers and community partners who mentor students. Through the practicum, students contribute their medical humanities skills and knowledge to a wide range of projects related to health. She has also taught the Introduction to Medical Humanities and Literature and Medicine classes and developed inter-institutional lecture series and courses. Previously, she taught graduate and undergraduate classes in literature and film.

Bailar is currently Vice Chair of the Governing Board of the American College of Acupuncture and Oriental Medicine, and through her extensive collaborations with the Institute for Spirituality and Health now serves on the planning committee for the Medicine and Religion annual conference. She is also a member of the organizing committee of the Ethics in Medicine Innovation group at Texas Children’s Hospital. She has held various advisory and mentoring roles with the Schull Institute, and through her connections there co-founded an international team investigating the socio-cultural effects of radiation exposure stemming from major nuclear events. Her current research focuses on the importance of personal narratives and caregiver perspectives in understanding experiences of illness.

Bailar holds a PhD in French Literature from Rice, and has published articles and book chapters on literary representations of anatomy, the actress Sarah Bernhardt, the poet Nicole Brossard, digital archives, and trends in higher education.