Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME)

• Vision
• Director's Statement
• Governance
• History
• Team
  • Executive Team
  • Faculty / Research Scientists
  • Post-Bachelor Fellows
  • Post-Graduate Fellows

• Who we are
  • Vision
  • Director's Statement
  • Governance
  • History
  • Team
• What we do
  • Research
  • Education and Training
• What you can do
  • Seminars
  • Events
  • Opportunities
• Information Resources
  • News
  • Publications
  • Datasets

Alan Lopez

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.

Selected Publications:

1. Vos T, Barker B, Begg S, Stanley L, Lopez AD. Burden of disease and injury in Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples. International Journal of Epidemiology. 2009; 38(2):470-477.
2. Joshi R, Lopez AD, MacMahon S, Reddy S, Dandona R, Dandona L, et al. Verbal autopsy coding: are multiple coders better than one? Bulletin of the World Health Organisation. 2009; 87:51-7.
3. Lopez AD. Health and health-research priorities: has WHO got it right? The Lancet. 2008; 372(9649):1525-27.
4. Khosravi A, Rao C, Naghavi M, Taylor R, Jafari N, Lopez AD. Impact of misclassification on measures of cardiovascular disease mortality in the Islamic Republic of Iran: a cross-sectional study. Bulletin of the World Health Organization. 2008; 86(9):688-96.
5. Franca E, de Abreu DX, Rao C, Lopez AD. Evaluation of cause-of-death statistics for Brazil, 2002–2004. International Journal of Epidemiology. 2008; 37:891–901.
6. Chandramohan D, Shibuya K, Setel P, Cairncross S, Lopez AD, Murray CJL, et al. Should data from demographic surveillance systems be made more widely available to researchers? PLoS Medicine. 2008; 5(2):0169-73.
7. Hill K, Vapattanawong P, Prasartkul P, Porapakkham Y, Lim SS, Lopez AD. Epidemiologic transition interrupted: a reassessment of mortality trends in Thailand, 1980-2000. International Journal of Epidemiology. 2007; 36(2):374-84.
8. Vapattanawong P, Hogan MC, Hanvoravongchai P, Gakidou E, Vos T, Lopez AD, et al. Reductions in child mortality levels and inequalities in Thailand: analysis of two censuses. The Lancet. 2007 Mar 10; 369(9564):850-5.
9. Rao C, Yang G, Hu J, Ma J, Xia W, Lopez AD. Validation of cause-of-death statistics in urban China. International Journal of Epidemiology. 2007 Feb 28; 36(3):642-51.
10. Murray CJL, Lopez AD, Feehan DM, Peter ST, Yang G. Validation of the Symptom Pattern Method for Analyzing Verbal Autopsy Data. PloS Medicine. 2007; 4(11):e327.
11. Murray CJL, Lopez AD, Barofsky JT, Bryson-Cahn C, Lozano R. Estimating Population Cause-Specific Mortality Fractions from in-Hospital Mortality: Validation of a New Method. PLoS Medicine. 2007; 4(11):1754-65.
12. 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; 370(9592):1040-54.

Top of Page