By UW Medicine
Professors Christopher Murray and Alan Lopez, co-founders of the groundbreaking Global Burden of Disease Study, will receive the John Dirks Canada Gairdner Global Health Award. It is one of the world’s most esteemed prizes for health research.
Murray directs the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation at the University of Washington School of Medicine in Seattle. Lopez is a laureate professor at the University of Melbourne in Australia.
“It is a great honor to receive the Gairdner Award,” Murray said. “This is recognition not only of the work Alan and I have conducted, but also of the nearly 3,200 collaborators contributing to the study. Moreover, it is an acknowledgement of scientific discipline of health data and its impact on improving people’s lives and livelihoods.”
Murray and Lopez first collaborated in 1990 on a study calculating estimates for eight regions, 107 diseases, and 10 risk factors. Today the Global Burden of Disease study is published annually in The Lancet medical journal and recognized as the world’s largest scientific collaboration, with input from 3,191 investigators in 143 locations.
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