Prior to working at the University of Melbourne, Lopez worked at the World Health Organization in Geneva for 22 years. He held a series of technical and senior managerial posts including Chief epidemiologist in WHO's Tobacco Control Program, Manager of WHO's Program on Substance Abuse, Director of the Epidemiology and Burden of Disease Unit and Senior Science Advisor to the Director-General. On leaving the World Health Organization he was appointed as the Head of the School of Population Health at the University of Queensland from 2003-2012. Lopez is a widely cited author with over 75,000 citations to his work in health and medical research. Most notably, he is the co-founder of the Global Burden of Disease Study with Christopher J.L. Murray, and co-founded the Peto-Lopez method with Sir Richard Peto, to estimate tobacco-attributable mortality from vital statistics. Lopez is on the editorial boards of PLoS Medicine, The International Journal of Epidemiology and Preventive Medicine, BMC Medicine, and is co-Editor in Chief of Population Health Metrics. He is also a member of the Scientific Advisory Committee for the International Network for the Demographic Evaluation of Populations and their Health in Developing Countries. He was a member of the Wellcome Trust Population and Public Health Funding Committee, the WHO Expert Committee on Non-communicable Disease Surveillance, the United States National Academy of Sciences Panel on Divergent Trends in Longevity, the Scientific Board of the Oxford Health Alliance Grand Challenges in Non-Communicable Disease, and was former Chair of the Health and Medical Research Council of Queensland. He has been awarded several major research grants in epidemiology, health services research and population health, including funding from the NHMRC, Wellcome Trust, Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and AusAID, and is currently the Chief Investigator-A on national and international competitive research grants in excess of 10 million. He was elected to the Institute of Medicine of the US National Academies of the United States in 2009 and awarded the Peter Wills medal in 2014 by Research Australia for his outstanding contribution in building Australia's international reputation in health and medical research. In 2016 Lopez was appointed a Companion of the Order of Australia for eminent service to science, both nationally and internationally, as an academic, researcher and author, and to the advancement of planning and policy development to improve public health in developing countries.
