Professor Alan Lopez AC PhD FAHMS 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 (GBD) Group at Melbourne, Visiting Professor of Epidemiology and Director of the IHME-Big Data Institute Strategic Partnership at the University of Oxford, and an Affiliate Professor of Global Health at the University of Washington. He held prior appointments as Professor of Medical Statistics and Global Health, and Head of the School of Population Health at the University of Queensland and several senior technical and senior managerial posts at the World Health Organization in Geneva including Chief Epidemiologist in WHO’s Tobacco Control Program, Director of WHO’s Epidemiology and Burden of Disease Unit and Senior Science Advisor to the Director-General. More recently, he has led the Bloomberg Data for Health global initiative to improve the registration and certification of births, deaths and causes of death to better inform global and national investments for health development. He is the co-author with Christopher Murray of the seminal Global Burden of Disease Study (1996), and subsequent updates, which have greatly influenced global and national debates about priority setting and resource allocation in health. In 2018, Professors Lopez and Murray were awarded the John Dirks Canada Gairdner Global Health Award, for their ground-breaking work in conceptualizing and quantifying the Global Burden of Disease. He was awarded the Peter Wills Medal by Research Australia in 2014 for his outstanding contributions to building Australia’s international reputation in health and medical research. Since 2015 he has been listed among Thompson Reuters Highly Cited (HiCi) Researchers in clinical medicine, with over 130,000 citations to his work, and in 2015 was ranked among the top 10 most cited scientists in the world by Thompson Reuters. He is a Foreign Associate Member of the US National Academy of Medicine and a Fellow of the Australian Academy of Health and Medical Sciences. In 2016 he was made a Companion of the Order of Australia (AC) for eminent service to science and to the advancement of planning and policy development to improve public health in developing countries.