Christopher J.L. Murray
Professor and Chair of Health Metrics Sciences, University of Washington and Director of the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME).
Charles M. and Martha Hitchcock Lectures
October 5, 2022 — 4:10 PMInternational House, Chevron Auditorium, 2299 Piedmont Avenue — UC Berkeley Campus
About this lecture The Global Burden of Disease Study (GBD) began in 1991 sponsored by the World Bank and the World Health Organization to fill a critical gap in global health information. It has grown steadily to become an … Continued
International House, Chevron Auditorium, 2299 Piedmont Avenue - UC Berkeley Campus Berkeley Graduate Lectures [email protected] false MM/DD/YYYY
About this lecture
The Global Burden of Disease Study (GBD) began in 1991 sponsored by the World Bank and the World Health Organization to fill a critical gap in global health information. It has grown steadily to become an active collaboration of more than 8000 scientists, researchers and policy-makers from 156 countries working together to quantify health at the national and subnational level. The GBD provides a highly standardized approach for tackling the many challenges in producing a comprehensive assessment of health overtime. The issues that need to be addressed or at least reckoned with include missing data, inconsistent case definitions, diverse instruments and assays, conflicting data, and exclusion of disadvantaged groups from administrative data. The GBD has led to new and constantly evolving approaches for correcting for bias and data synthesis. The study has generated nearly 2000 publications in the peer-reviewed literature and wide policy impact; nevertheless, it continues to generate controversy. The GBD has many limitations and ongoing developments hope to address some of these limitations. This lecture will draw some general lessons learned from three decades of the GBD both on the analysis of global health and communicating results to decision-makers.
About Christopher J.L. Murray
Dr. Christopher J.L. Murray is Chair of Health Metrics Sciences at the University of Washington and Director of the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME). His career has focused on improving population health worldwide through better evidence. A physician and health economist, his work has led to the development of innovative methods to strengthen health measurement, analyze the performance of health systems, understand the drivers of health, and produce forecasts of the future state of health.
He has led critical analyses during the COVID-19 pandemic to understand its impact on health systems and the population as a whole, and the effectiveness of policy interventions to mitigate it. The White House, European Commission, many governments, and organizations such as WHO EURO, PAHO, and Africa CDC use IHME COVID-19 forecasts and policy scenarios as a trusted source of evidence. Dr. Murray also leads the Global Burden of Disease (GBD) collaboration, 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. The GBD is now a network of 7,700 scientists and decision-makers from 156 countries who together generate annually updated estimates. He is an elected member of the National Academy of Medicine (NAM) and the 2018 co-recipient of the John Dirks Canada Gairdner Global Health Award.