Alan Lopez
Affiliate Professor
Burden of disease assessment; mortality analysis and causes of death; tobacco epidemiology and the global tobacco epidemic; global descriptive epidemiology of major diseases, injuries, and risk factors; measurement of mortality and causes of death.
Bio
Alan Lopez, MS, PhD, is an Affiliate Professor of Global Health at the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME) at the University of Washington. He is also Head of the School of Population Health and Professor of Medical Statistics and Population Health at the University of Queensland in Australia.
Prior to joining the University of Queensland and IHME, Dr. Lopez worked at the World Health Organization (WHO) in Geneva for 22 years, where he held a series of technical and senior managerial posts including Chief Epidemiologist in WHO’s Tobacco Control Program, Manager of WHO’s Program on Substance Abuse, Director of the Epidemiology and Burden of Disease Unit, and Senior Science Advisor to the Director-General.
Dr. Lopez is a highly cited author whose publications have received worldwide acclaim for their importance and influence in health and medical research with over 11,000 lifetime citations. He has published more than 200 peer-reviewed journal articles, books, 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 co-authored with Christopher Murray the Global Burden of Disease Study, which has greatly influenced debates about priority setting and resource allocation in health. His 2006 Lancet paper with Murray and colleagues was listed among the 25 best publications in health and medical research worldwide that year.
Dr. Lopez 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 (jointly with Sir Richard Peto) the Leverhulme Prize by the Liverpool School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine in 1998 for his contributions to epidemiology and international health.
Dr. Lopez is on the editorial board of PLoS Medicine and Preventive Medicine and is co-Editor-in-Chief of Population Health Metrics. He is a member of the Wellcome Trust Population and Public Health Funding Committee (2007-2010), the WHO Expert Committee on NCD Surveillance (2009-2011), and the US National Academy of Sciences Panel on Divergent Trends in Longevity (2008-2011). He has been awarded several major research grants in epidemiology, health services research, and population health.
He received a BS with honors from the University of Western Australia, an MS from Purdue University in Lafayette, IN, and his PhD from the Australian National University in Canberra.
Published Works
Murray CJL, Rosenfeld LC, Lim SS, Andrews KG, Foreman KJ, Haring D, Fullman N, Naghavi M, Lozano R, Lopez ADL. Global malaria mortality between 1980 and 2010: a systematic analysis. The Lancet. 2012; 379:413-431.
Foreman KJ, Lozano R, Lopez AD, Murray CJL. Modeling causes of death: an integrated approach using CODEm. Population Health Metrics. 2012; 10:1.
Lozano R, Wang H, Foreman KJ, Rajaratnam JK, Naghavi M, Marcus JR, Dwyer-Lindgren L, Lofgren KT, Phillips D, Atkinson C, Lopez AD, Murray CJL. Progress towards Millennium Development Goals 4 and 5 on maternal and child mortality: an updated systematic analysis. The Lancet. 2011; 378:1139-1165.
Related Publications & Presentations
Murray CJL, Rosenfeld LC, Lim SS, Andrews KG, Foreman KJ, Haring D, Fullman N, Naghavi M, Lozano R, Lopez ADL. Global malaria mortality between 1980 and 2010: a systematic analysis. The Lancet. 2012; 379:413-431.
Foreman KJ, Lozano R, Lopez AD, Murray CJL. Modeling causes of death: an integrated approach using CODEm. Population Health Metrics. 2012; 10:1.
Lozano R, Wang H, Foreman KJ, Rajaratnam JK, Naghavi M, Marcus JR, Dwyer-Lindgren L, Lofgren KT, Phillips D, Atkinson C, Lopez AD, Murray CJL. Progress towards Millennium Development Goals 4 and 5 on maternal and child mortality: an updated systematic analysis. The Lancet. 2011; 378:1139-1165.
Forouzanfar MH, Foreman KJ, Delossantos AM, Lozano R, Lopez AD, Murray CJL, Naghavi M. Breast and cervical cancer in 187 countries between 1980 and 2010: a systematic analysis. The Lancet. 2011; DOI:10.1016/S0140-6736(11)61351-2.
Murray CJL, Lopez AD, Black R, Ahuja R, Ali SM, Baqui A, Dandona L, Dantzer E, Das V, Dhingra U, Dutta A, Fawzi W, Flaxman AD, Gomez S, Hernandez B, Joshi R, Kalter H, Kumar A, Kumar V, Lozano R, Lucero M, Mehta S, Neal B, Ohno SL, Prasad R, Praveen D, Premji Z, Ramirez-Villalobos D, Remolador H, Riley I, Romero M, Said M, Sanvictores D, Sazawal S, Tallo V. Population Health Metrics Research Consortium gold standard verbal autopsy validation study: design, implementation, and development of analysis datasets. Population Health Metrics. 2011; 9:27.
Murray CJL, Lozano R, Flaxman AD, Vahdatpour A, Lopez AD. Robust metrics for assessing the performance of different verbal autopsy cause assignment methods in validation studies. Population Health Metrics. 2011; 9:28.
Lozano R, Lopez AD, Atkinson C, Naghavi M, Flaxman AD, Murray CJL, the Population Health Metrics Research Consortium (PHMRC). Performance of physician-certified verbal autopsies: multisite validation study using clinical diagnostic gold standards. Population Health Metrics. 2011; 9:32.
Murray CJL, James SL, Birnbaum JK, Freeman MK, Lozano R, Lopez AD, and the Population Health Metrics Research Consortium (PHMRC). Simplified Symptom Pattern Method for verbal autopsy analysis: multisite validation study using clinical diagnostic gold standards. Population Health Metrics. 2011; 9:30.
Rajaratnam JK, Marcus JR, Flaxman AD, Wang H, Levin-Rector A, Dwyer L, Costa M, Lopez AD, Murray CJL. Neonatal, postneonatal, childhood, and under-5 mortality for 187 countries, 1970–2010: a systematic analysis of progress towards Millennium Development Goal 4. The Lancet. 2010 May 24; 375:1988–2008.
Rajaratnam JK, Marcus JR, Levin-Rector A, Chalupka AN, Wang H, Dwyer L, Costa M, Lopez AD, Murray CJL. Worldwide mortality in men and women aged 15–59 years from 1970 to 2010: a systematic analysis. The Lancet. 2010 Apr 30; 375:1704–1720.
Rajaratnam JK, Tran LN, Lopez AD, Murray CJL. Measuring under-five mortality: validation of new low-cost methods. PLoS Medicine. 2010 April 13; 7(4):e1000253.
Hogan MC, Foreman KJ, Naghavi M, Ahn SY, Wang M, Makela SM, Lopez AD, Lozano R, Murray CJL. Maternal mortality for 181 countries, 1980-2008: a systematic analysis of progress towards Millennium Development Goal 5. The Lancet. 2010 May 8; 375:1609–1623. Published online first April 12, 2010.
Murray CJL, Lopez AD, Feehan DM, Peter ST, Yang G. Validation of the symptom pattern method for analyzing verbal autopsy data. PLoS Medicine. 2007 Nov 20; 4(11):e327.
Murray CJL, Laakso T, Shibuya K, Hill K, Lopez AD. Can we achieve Millennium Development Goal 4? New analysis of country trends and forecasts of under-5 mortality to 2015. The Lancet. 2007 Sept 22; 370:1040–1054.