Ron M. Walls, MD, FRCPC, is the Chief Operating Officer of Mass General Brigham, an $18B integrated academic health system that includes Massachusetts General Hospital and Brigham and Women’s Hospital. He is also the Neskey Family Professor of Emergency Medicine at Harvard Medical School. From 2015-2020, Dr. Walls was the Executive Vice President and Chief Operating Officer of Brigham Health. A native Canadian, Dr. Walls attended medical school at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada, and completed his residency training in Emergency Medicine at Denver General Hospital. He served on the faculty at George Washington University Medical Center and then as Associate Professor and Head of the Department of Emergency Medicine at Vancouver General Hospital.

From 1993 through 2014, Dr. Walls served as Chair of the Department of Emergency Medicine at Brigham and Women’s Hospital, and in 2006, he became the first emergency physician to achieve the rank of Professor at Harvard Medical School.

Dr. Walls’s principal academic contributions were in advancing emergency airway management. His research and teaching were major drivers of the widespread adoption of neuromuscular blocking agents for emergency intubations. In all, he has more than 180 scientific publications. Dr. Walls is editor-in-chief of Rosen’s Emergency Medicine, editor-in-chief for emergency medicine for UpToDate, and editor emeritus of the Walls Manual of Emergency Airway Management, now in its fifth edition. He has received major awards from all three emergency medicine specialty organizations and has served as visiting professor at more than 40 institutions.