Prof. Alan Lopez

University of Queensland

Epidemiology, Population Health Measurement, and Global Health

Professor Alan Lopez is a Professor of Global Health, and Head of the School of Population Health at the University of Queensland. He is also an Affiliate Professor of Global Health at the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation at the University of Washington.Prior to joining the University in January 2003, he worked at the World Health Organisation in Geneva, Switzerland, for 22 years where he held a series of senior technical and 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 rank in importance and influence in health and medical research,with over 16,700 lifetime citations, and over 250 peer-reviewed journal articles, books, letters and book chapters on mortality analysis and causes of death, including the impact of the global tobacco epidemic, and on the global descriptive epidemiology of major diseases, injuries and risk factors. He is the co-author with Christopher Murray of the seminal Global Burden of Disease Study (1996) (2800 citations) which has greatly influenced debates about priority setting and resource allocation in health. His 2006 Lancet paper (lead author) with Murray and colleagues was listed among the 25 best publications in health and medical research worldwide in that year (Lancet, 2006, pg91). Three of his Lancet papers with Murray have each been cited more than 1500 times.

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.  He, Sir Richard and others recently published a second (online) edition of their seminal book on Mortality from Smoking in Developed Countries.  He was awarded the Leverhulme Prize (with Sir Richard Peto) by the Liverpool School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine in 1998 for his contributions to epidemiology and international health.

Professor Lopez is on the editorial board of PLoS Medicine, The International Journal of Epidemiology and Preventive Medicine, and co-Editor in Chief of Population Health Metrics.  He is also a member of the Scientific Advisory Committee for INDEPTH. He was 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. Since 2007, he has been the Executive Director of the AusAID-funded Health Information Systems Knowledge Hub at the University of Queensland.

Professor Lopez 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, and is currently the CIA on national and international competitive research grants in excess of $10 million, and a chief investigator on others.  He has given over 50 invited lectures or keynote addresses at national and international conferences since 2000, including the Cottrell Oration (RACP, 2006), the Redfern Oration (RACP, 2002) and the R Douglas Wright lecture in 2000.  He gave the Global Health Series lecture at the Fogarty International Centre of the US National Institutes for Health in 2003. He was elected as a Foreign Associate Member to the Institute of Medicine of the U.S National Academies of Sciences in 2009, and serves on the National Academies of Sciences’ Committee on Population as an expert panel member.