Christopher J. L. Murray[1][2] (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.

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.

Murray pioneered concepts such as the disability-adjusted life year (DALY), a measure now broadly used to evaluate the cost effectiveness of health interventions.

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.

[3] 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.

[3] 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.

[3] After returning to Minnesota, John Murray conducted experiments demonstrating that malaria infections grew faster in rats receiving intravenous iron.

[3] 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.

[8] 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.

[9] 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.

[10] 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.