Alexander Y. Walley, MD, MSc
Alexander Y. Walley, MD, MSc, is a clinician investigator, HIV primary care provider, and substance use care specialist who joined the Section of General Internal Medicine in 2005 as a fellow in the Clinical Addiction Research and Education (CARE) Unit. During his two-year fellowship, he received a Master’s of Science in Epidemiology at BU School of Public Health and conducted research on the medical complications of substance use, specifically HIV and overdose.
Dr. Walley joined the GIM faculty in 2007 and, with funding from the Substance Abuse Mental Health Services Administration, established a multi-disciplinary clinical program for people with HIV and substance use in the BMC HIV clinic. He became the medical director of the Massachusetts Department of Public Health’s (MDPH) community naloxone distribution program, which has been a key source and inspiration for his research on community overdose prevention since. In 2011, Dr. Walley and Dan Alford started the Addiction Medicine Fellowship program, one of nine new addiction medicine fellowships nationally at the time that formed the basis for addiction medicine as a subspecialty. In 2015, he launched Boston Medical Center’s addiction consult service (ACS) as a fellowship rotation. The following year, he founded Faster Paths to Treatment, the low-barrier substance use bridge clinic at BMC in collaboration with Emergency Medicine and with funding from MDPH.
In 2022, Dr. Walley stepped down as director of the Grayken Addiction Medicine fellowship. Under his leadership from 2011 to 2022, 20 addiction specialists graduated – six are directors for addiction medicine fellowships and 13 are faculty at medical schools, nine of whom are at BU Chobanian & Avedisian SOM. Most notably, Dr. Walley is currently serving as the president of the American College of Academic Addiction Medicine, and his term runs through 2025. He is the medical director for the Massachusetts Department of Public Health’s Bureau of Substance Addiction Services, the Overdose Prevention Program, and the SafeSpot Overdose Hotline. In 2025, he took over from Dan Alford as director of the GIM CARE Unit.
Dr. Walley was born in Fort Wayne, Indiana, and he is the first physician in his family. He received his bachelor’s degree in history and literature at Harvard College and earned his MD degree from Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine in 2000. He completed his residency in internal medicine in the Primary Care Program at San Francisco General Hospital (SFGH) and the University of California, San Francisco. He served as a chief resident at SFGH.