Alexander Y. Walley, MD

Biography

Dr Walley is Professor of Medicine and an addiction expert at Boston Medical Center and Chobanian and Avedisian School of Medicine focused on the medical complications of substance use, specifically HIV and overdose. Dr Walley has conducted multiple studies related to the opioid crisis and the integration of addiction specialty care and general medical care. He led, as PI, a CDC-SAMHSA-Epi-AID investigation of the surge in fentanyl-related overdose, a CDC-funded study of the Massachusetts community naloxone program which demonstrated community-level reductions in overdose death rates, and a SAMHSA-funded program that integrated addiction treatment into the clinical care of people with/at risk for HIV. He is principal investigator for several CDC and NIH funded studies of community overdose interventions, including post-overdose outreach programs and overdose prevention hotlines. For the NIH-funded HEALing Communities Study - Massachusetts, he served as the Care Continuum Core Director 2019-2025. He has worked as Co-I with addiction, overdose, and HIV expertise on NIDA and NIAAA-funded clinical trials and cohort studies. He has led several studies of overdose and medication for opioid use disorder in the population individually-linked Massachusetts Public Health Data Warehouse that have demonstrated the epidemiology of overdose, its risk factors, along with the benefits of and gaps in medication for opioid use disorder.

Dr. Walley is a founding director of the Grayken Addiction Medicine Fellowship. From 2011 to 2022, 20 addiction specialists graduated, 6 of whom serve as directors for addiction medicine fellowships, 13 are faculty at medical schools, 9 at Boston University School of Medicine and Boston Medical Center. He was a founding board member and treasurer of the Addiction Medicine Fellowship Director’s Association 2016-2019 and American College of Academic Addiction Medicine (ACAAM) starting in 2019. He is currently the past president for ACAAM for 2026-2027. With his mentor, Dr. Jeffrey Samet, he is multi-PI on the NIDA-funded R25 Clinical Addiction Research and Education Program, which supports the Chief Resident and Fellow Immersion Training and the CARE Faculty Scholar programs and has been continuously funded since 2002. He is co-editor in chief of the Addiction Science and Clinical Practice peer-reviewed journal.

Dr. Walley provides primary care and addiction medicine consultations in the HIV primary care clinic at BMC. He founded BMC’s inpatient Addiction Consult Service in 2015 and the Faster Paths low-barrier access substance use bridge clinic in 2016. He previously was a site medical director for opioid treatment programs in Boston from 2007 to 2016. He serves as the medical director for the Massachusetts Department of Public Health’s Bureau of Substance Addiction Services, the Overdose Prevention Program, and the SafeSpot Overdose Prevention Hotline. Since 2007, the MDPH program, under his medical license and oversight has trained and equipped hundreds of thousands of people in Massachusetts’s communities with naloxone rescue kits, including people at-risk for overdose and their social networks. Since 2022, the SafeSpot has provided 24/7 access to trained, paid peer operators who have taken over 17,000 calls and facilitated the successful rescue of over 50 callers.