Laureate Professor Alan Lopez is an international authority on the global burden of disease and the use of health data for the development of health systems and policy.
He has been awarded several major research grants in epidemiology, health services research and population health, including funding from the NHMRC, Wellcome Trust, Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and AusAID.
He currently leads the Data for Health Initiative funded by a philanthropic grant from Bloomberg Philanthropies in association with the Australian Government’s Innovation Xchange program. This initiative aims to improve health data in developing countries by using new innovative research and communications technologies to help countries improve basic birth and death data and to monitor major risk factors.
Partners in this initiative include the Australian Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade, the CDC Foundation, Union North America, Johns Hopkins University and the World Health Organization.
Alan Lopez is the lead author of the Lancet Series ‘Counting the billions: Registration, recognition and the power of vital statistics’, being published in four papers over 2015.
Prior to working at the University of Melbourne, Alan Lopez worked at the World Health Organization (WHO) in Geneva for 22 years in senior roles which included: 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). 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.
Alan Lopez has over 82,000 citations to his work in health and medical research. His major collaborations have been in the measurement of tobacco-related mortality and the global burden of disease. He is the co-founder of the Global Burden of Disease Study with Christopher Murray, and co-developer of the Peto-Lopez method with Sir Richard Peto, widely used by countries to estimate tobacco-attributable mortality.
Alan Lopez is on the editorial boards of PLoS Medicine, Preventive Medicine, BMC Medicine, and is co-Editor in Chief of Population Health Metrics. 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 (2007-11), the WHO Expert Committee on Non-communicable Disease Surveillance (2009-11), the United States’ National Academy of Sciences Panel on Divergent Trends in Longevity (2008-11), the Scientific Board of the Oxford Health Alliance Grand Challenges in Non-Communicable Disease (2006-09), and was former Chair of the Health and Medical Research Council of Queensland (2004-08). He is one of a few Australians elected to the Institute of Medicine of the US National Academy of Sciences.
Find out more about Alan Lopez' experience
Alan Lopez' highlights
FEATURED Journal article
Global and regional mortality from 235 causes of death for 20 age groups in 1990 and 2010: a systematic analysis for the Global Burden of Disease Study 2010 (vol 380, pg 2095, 2012)
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Projects
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Project Types
2
Internal Research Grant
2
Research Contracts
1
Research Grant
Scholarly Works
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Keyword Analysis
News
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Honours, Awards and Fellowships
FAFPHM - Fellow of the Australian Faculty of Public Health Medicine
National Health and Medical Research Council of Australia: Applied Health Sciences Fellowship in Epidemiology
Credentials
Positions
Laureate Prof Rowden-White Chair Of Global Health
Melbourne School Of Population And Global Health
Committee For Health Care And Public Health Systems Planning
National Academy of Medicine (USA)
Co-Chair
WHO Reference Group on Health Statistics
Founding Board Member & Co-Chair, The Child Health And Mortality Prevention Surveillance (Champs) Network
Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation
Who Expert Committee On Ncd Surveillance
WHO Expert Committee on NCD Surveillance
Wellcome Trust Population And Public Health Funding Committee
Wellcome Trust Population and Public Health Funding Committee
Education
Fellow of the Australian Faculty of Public Health Medicine (Hon Causa)
The Royal Australasian College of Physicians
Doctor of Philosophy
Australian National University
Master of Science
Purdue University
Bachelor of Science (Honours)
The University of Western Australia