Colin D. Mathers

Colin D. Mathers is a senior scientist in the Evidence and Information for Policy Cluster at the World Health Organization in Geneva . From 2002 to 2005, he managed the World Health Organization's Epidemiology and Burden of Disease Unit. Prior to joining the World Health Organization in 2000, he worked for the Australian Institute of Health and Welfare for 13 years in technical and senior managerial posts.

Dr. Mathers has published widely on population health and mortality analysis; on inequalities in health, health expectancies, and burden of disease; and on health system costs and performance. He developed the first set of Australian health accounts mapping health expenditures by age, sex, and disease and injury causes (1998) and carried out an influential national burden of disease and risk factors study (1999). At the World Health Organization, he played a key role in the development of comparable estimates of healthy life expectancy for 192 countries, in the reassessment of the global burden of disease for the years 2000-2, and in the development of software tools to support burden of disease analysis at the country level. He recently completed new projections of global, regional, and country mortality and burden of disease from 2002 to 2030.

Dr. Mathers graduated with an honors degree and university medal in physics from the University of Sydney in 1975 and was awarded a Ph.D. in theoretical physics from the University of Sydney in 1979.His principal research interests are the measurement and reporting of population health and its determinants, burden of disease methods and applications, measurement of health state prevalences, and cross-population comparability. He has collaborated with leading researchers throughout the world on issues relating to the development and applications of summary measures of population health.