Professor Alan Lopez is a Melbourne Laureate Professor and the Rowden-White Chair of Global Health and Burden of Disease Measurement at The University of Melbourne. He is also Director of the Global Burden of Disease Group in the Melbourne School of Population and Global Health.
He held prior appointments as Professor of Medical Statistics and Population Health and Professor of Global Health, and Head of the School of Population Health at the University of Queensland from 2003- 2012. Prior to joining the University in January 2003, he worked at the World Health Organization (WHO) in Geneva, Switzerland, for 22 years where he held a series of technical and senior managerial posts including Chief epidemiologist in WHO’s Tobacco Control Program (1992-95), Manager of WHO’s Program on Substance Abuse (1996-98), Director of the Epidemiology and Burden of Disease Unit (1999-2001) and Senior Science Advisor to the Director-General (2002).
He is a highly cited author whose publications have received worldwide acclaim for their importance and influence in health and medical research. He is the co-author with Christopher Murray of the seminal Global Burden of Disease Study (1996) which has greatly influenced debates about priority setting and resource allocation in health. Murray and Lopez recently published the GBD2010 Study in the Lancet (2012) He is the co-author with Sir Richard Peto of the Peto-Lopez method which is widely used to estimate tobacco-attributable mortality to support policy action.
Professor Lopez is on the editorial board of PLoS Medicine and Preventive Medicine, and co-Editor in Chief of Population Health Metrics. He was elected as a Foreign Associate Member of the Institute of Medicine of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences in 2009. He has previously served as a member of the Wellcome Trust Population and Public Health Funding Committee (2007-2010), the WHO Expert Committee on NCD Surveillance (2009-2011), the US 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 (2006-2008), and was Chair of the Executive Board of the Health Metrics Network ( 2012-2013). He has been awarded several major research grants in epidemiology, health services research and population health, including funding from the NHMRC, Wellcome Trust, ill and Melinda Gates Foundation and AusAID, and is currently the CIA on national and international competitive research grants in excess of $10 million, and a chief investigator on others exceeding $25 million.