Chris Murray, professor of global health at the University of Washington and director of the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation, first met Bill Gates when the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation was just getting started.
“Bill’s hunger for data and evidence and science is uniquely high,” Murray told Devex at a recent event celebrating the 10 year anniversary of IHME and a number of other Seattle global health organizations. “He really does just love information.”
When the Gates Foundation launched in 2000, Murray was at the World Health Organization, where he was a founder of the Global Burden of Disease approach. That caught the attention of the Seattle-based philanthropists, who decided early on that they wanted to use GBD metrics to help set their own priorities, as they built what is now the largest charitable foundation in the world. In 2007, Murray returned to Seattle, this time to pitch the idea for IHME, which would provide an evidence-based picture of global health to inform the kind of data-driven work the foundation is now known for.