Prof Lopez is a Melbourne Laureate Professor and the Rowden-White Chair of Global Health & Burden of Disease Measurement at The University of Melbourne. He is Director of the Global Burden of Disease (GBD) Group in the Melbourne School of Population and Global Health. He held prior appointments as Professor of Global Health, and Head of the School of Population Health at the University of Queensland from 2003-2012. He worked at the World Health Organization in Geneva for 22 years, including Chief Epidemiologist in the Tobacco Control Program and Director of the Global Burden of Disease Unit. He is the Technical Director for the Civil Registration and Vital Statistics (CRVS) component of the Bloomberg Data for Health Initiative, as well as a member of the National Academy of Medicine in the USA.

Prof Murray, MD, DPhil, is a Professor of Global Health at the University of Washington and Institute Director of the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME) whose 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.