David and Barbara Roux established the Roux Prize in 2013 to award innovation in the application of disease burden research. The prize recognizes the person who has used health evidence in bold ways to make people healthier.
Mr. Roux is a founding board member of IHME and, over the past decade, he championed IHME’s most ambitious project, the updating of the Global Burden of Disease (GBD). And he encouraged IHME, as the coordinating center for researchers around the world, to find ways to make the information more useful, so that it would actually have an impact on the ground.
The GBD enterprise dates back to 1993, with the publication of the World Bank’s World Development Report, and, since that time, GBD data have been used in a wide variety of ways to inform better policymaking at the local and international levels. Mr. Roux wanted to reward that kind of evidence-based innovation and to encourage even bolder attempts to improve population health through better measurement of disease burden.