Professor Alan Lopez AC 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 a visiting Professor and Director of the IHME-Big Data Institute Unit at Oxford University and an Affiliate Professor of Global Health at the University of Washington. Professor Lopez 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, 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.