# Christopher J.L. Murray

Christopher J. L. Murray (born August 16, 1962) is an American physician and economist serving as Professor and Chair of Health Metrics Sciences at the University of Washington, Seattle. He is the director of the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation, a public health research institute best known for publishing the Global Burden of Disease Study. Prior to joining the University of Washington, Murray was the Richard Saltonstall Professor of Public Policy at the Harvard School of Public Health and Director of the Harvard Center for Population and Development Studies. Murray also served as Executive Director of the Evidence and Information for Policy Cluster at the World Health Organization, where he served under Gro Harlem Brundtland.
Alongside collaborators such as Alan Lopez and Julio Frenk, Murray is best known for creating the Global Burden of Disease Study, an international effort to catalog the causes of death and disability worldwide. Beginning with the 1993 World Development Report, Murray and his collaborators published several iterations of the Global Burden, culminating in a December 2012 edition of The Lancet featuring only research and commentary from Murray and his collaborators.
Murray pioneered concepts such as the disability-adjusted life year (DALY), a measure now broadly used to evaluate the cost effectiveness of health interventions. Much of his research has been funded by the Gates Foundation, whose focus on global health was strongly influenced by Murray and the 1993 World Development Report.

## Early life

Christopher J. L. Murray was born on August 15, 1962 to John and Anne Murray in Minneapolis, Minnesota. Both of his parents were from New Zealand, having met on a train returning from a school break to the University of Otago, where both were students. His parents would later move to Minnesota to take up positions at the Mayo Clinic. His mother was a microbiologist and his father was a cardiologist. His father later became a professor at the University of Minnesota.
Christopher Murray has three older siblings: Linda, Nigel, and Megan, a professor in the Department of Epidemiology at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. Murray's family traveled often throughout his childhood, visiting Thailand, Kenya, Afghanistan, Egypt, India, and Lebanon, in addition to many places in the United States.
In 1973, Murray traveled with his family to Diffa, Niger, where they worked in an otherwise unstaffed regional hospital built as part of an Italian overseas development program. While in Niger, the Murray family observed acute attacks of malaria in otherwise malnourished patients given food, suggesting a link between nutrition and the reproduction of the parasite. After returning to Minnesota, John Murray conducted experiments demonstrating that malaria infections grew faster in rats receiving intravenous iron. The results of the study were published in The Lancet under the names of Christopher Murray's parents, in addition to two of his siblings.
Murray attended Harvard University, where he graduated with Bachelor of Arts and Sciences degrees in 1984. During his undergraduate degree, Murray traveled in Tunisia, Egypt, India, and Pakistan, where he wrote for the travel guidebook series Let's Go. His senior thesis was advised by E. O. Wilson, and focused on the number of species a given area could support as a nature reserve.
His senior year, Murray was selected as a Rhodes Sholar and moved to the University of Oxford, where he would later receive a DPhil in International Health Economics. In 1985, Murray traveled to the World Health Organization in Geneva, where he met Alan Lopez and developed an interest in epidemiological statistics. He graduated from Oxford in 1987, and the same year published a critique of the methodology of several prominent epidemiological datasets, including those published by the United Nations Demographic Yearbook and World Development Report.

## Career

Murray previously served as director of the Harvard Initiative for Global Health and as executive director of the Evidence and Information for Policy Cluster at the World Health Organization. He graduated from Harvard University in 1984 and was a Rhodes Scholar, attending Oxford University, where he earned a DPhil in International Health Economics. In 1988, he returned to Harvard, where he specialized in internal medicine and earned a Medical Doctorate. Since, he has worked on measurement of health and health outcomes. He was a part of the Disease Control Priorities Project. In 2005–2007, Murray was director of the Harvard Center for Population and Development Studies.
In 2007, Murray moved from Harvard to the University of Washington to head the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation with the help of former Mexican Secretary of Health, Julio Frenk, who serves as chair of the Board of Directors. At the institute, Murray's work has included studying adult and child mortality, costs of various health interventions, and continuing work with colleagues at Harvard, the WHO and elsewhere on projects that conduct research and mine data to improve public health.
The Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation COVID model was called the Chris Murray model in White House press briefings.
In 2020, Murray was appointed by the Council on Foreign Relations to serve on its Independent Task Force on Improving Pandemic Preparedness, co-chaired by Sylvia Mathews Burwell and Frances Fragos Townsend.

## Research

While at Harvard, Murray, along with medical demographer Alan Lopez, developed the disability adjusted life years (DALY) approach to measuring the global burden of disease. Using this approach, it is possible to calculate standardized estimates for the years of healthy life lost due to disease, injury and risk factors over time. It is also possible to compare the effects of different diseases on a population. The research is intended to be used by policy makers to weigh healthcare decisions and allocate resources.
The idea behind the work was to remove politics and other pressures from the research questions. This led to some tension when the team moved to the World Health Organization. When countries and organizations were found to have poorer-than-expected health outcomes, they complained to the W.H.O. At one point, an independent committee was formed to review some of the results.
His work attracted the attention of Bill Gates, who decided to use the concept of DALYs to help determine priorities and evaluate potential projects in global health. In 2007, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, along with the state of Washington, established IHME and selected Murray as its leader. As head of IHME, Murray greatly expanded on his earlier research, leading an effort by 486 researchers from 302 institutions in 50 countries to produce Global Burden of Disease reports in 2010 and 2013.
The later reports were significantly larger than the first. In 1990, for example, researchers catalogued 107 diseases and injuries. The 2013 report involved creating and then analyzing a database of over 800 million deaths, and produced estimates for death and disability from 240 health conditions.
Some of the findings from his studies have been controversial. In 2010, The Lancet published one such study on global maternal death rates, showing, to the surprise of some in the field, that maternal mortality had dropped significantly over the prior three decades. Fearing the results might undermine their ongoing efforts, some advocacy groups tried to delay publication of the material, The Lancet editor said at the time.
In 2008, The Lancet published findings from Murray and IHME's work evaluating the work of Gavi, the vaccine alliance, which showed many countries had been inflating the number of children being immunized for diphtheria, pertussis, and tetanus. The study found that progress in childhood immunizations is far lower than prior official reports. The countries were receiving funding for the vaccinations, raising the concern that Gavi may have paid out much more than it should have based on the number of children immunized. After the report was published Gavi suspended payments and commenced a review.