Christopher J.L. Murray, MD, DPhil, is Professor and Chair of Health Metrics Sciences at the University of Washington and Institute Director of the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME). His career has focused on improving health for everyone worldwide by improving health evidence. A physician and health economist, his work has led to the development of a range of new methods and empirical studies to strengthen health measurement, analyze the performance of public health and medical care systems, and assess the cost-effectiveness of health technologies. IHME provides rigorous and comparable measurement of the world’s most important health problems and evaluates the strategies used to address them.

Dr. Murray is a founder of the Global Burden of Disease (GBD) approach, a systematic effort to quantify the comparative magnitude of health loss due to diseases, injuries, and risk factors by age, sex, and geography over time. After co-authoring the original GBD study in the early 1990s, he brought the GBD enterprise to IHME in 2007 and led the consortium of almost 500 researchers from 50 countries that produced the Global Burden of Diseases, Injuries, and Risk Factors Study 2010 (GBD 2010). GBD now produces annual updates to its estimates and has a current network of more of 3,824 collaborators across 143 countries and 2 territories. The most recent of the updates, GBD 2017, presents estimates of all-cause mortality, deaths by cause, years of life lost, years lived with disability, and disability-adjusted life years by country, age, and sex from 1990 to 2017.