Alan Lopez

Career

He is also the Director of the Global Burden of Disease Group in the Melbourne School of Population and Global Health and an Affiliate Professor of Global Health at the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME) based out of the University of Washington in Seattle. Prior to working at the University of Melbourne, Professor Lopez worked at the World Health Organization (World Health Organization) in Geneva for 22 years. He held a series of technical and senior managerial posts including Chief epidemiologist in World Health Organization"s Tobacco Control Program (1992-1995), Manager of World Health Organization"s Program on Substance Abuse (1996-1998), Director of the Epidemiology and Burden of Disease Unit (1999-2001) and Senior Science Advisor to the Director-General (2002).

On leaving the World Health Organization he was appointed as the Head of the School of Population Health at the University of Queensland from 2003-2012.

Professor Lopez is a widely cited author with over 75,000 citations to his work in health and medical research. Professor Lopez is on the editorial boards of PLoS Medicine, The International Journal of Epidemiology and Preventive Medicine, Business Service Management Medicine, and is co-Editor in Chief of Population Health Metrics.

He has been awarded several major research grants in epidemiology, health services research and population health, including funding from the National Health and Medical Research Council, Wellcome Trust, Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and Australian Agency for International Development , and is currently the Central Intelligence Agency on national and international competitive research grants in excess of $10 million.

Achievements

• He is a Melbourne Laureate Professor and the Rowden-White Chair of Global Health and Burden of Disease Measurement at The University of Melbourne. Most notably, he is the co-founder of the Global Burden of Disease Study with Christopher J.L. Murray, and co-founded the Peto-Lopez method with Sir Richard Peto,to estimate tobacco-attributable mortality from vital statistics. He was elected to the Institute of Medicine of the United States National Academies of the United States in 2009 and awarded the Peter Wills medal in 2014 by Research Australia for his outstanding contribution in building Australia’s international reputation in health and medical research.

Membership

He is also a member of the Scientific Advisory Committee for the International Network for the Demographic Evaluation of Populations and their Health in Developing Countries (INDEPTH Network). He was a member of the Wellcome Trust Population and Public Health Funding Committee (2007-2010), the World Health Organization Expert Committee on Non-communicable Disease Surveillance (2009-2011), the United States National Academy of Sciences Panel on Divergent Trends in Longevity (2008-2011), the Scientific Board of the Oxford Health Alliance Grand Challenges in Non-Communicable Disease (2006-2009), and was former Chair of the Health and Medical Research Council of Queensland.