August 5, 2016
Jay Orlander, M.D.
Boston University School of Medicine
Awards Committee
RE: Allan J. Walkey, MD, MSc
Dear Colleagues:
It is my profound honor to enthusiastically recommend Allan J. Walkey, MD, MSc, for the Junior Faculty Mentoring Award. Dr. Walkey merits the award by virtue of his exceptional research productivity, his high quality mentoring, and his contributions to BU School of Medicine.
Allan received his BA at Tufts, his MD at UMass Medical School, and his Masters in Epidemiology at the BU School of Public Health. He pursued his internship and residency at the Beth Israel/Deaconess Medical Center, his Pulmonary Critical Care Fellowship at Boston Medical Center, and his CREST Training Program at the BU School of Medicine. He has been an Assistant Professor of Medicine at BUSM since 2010.
Allan has received numerous awards throughout his career including graduating from Tufts Magna Cum Laude with Highest Thesis Honors and from University of Massachusetts Medical School Alpha Omega Alpha. He has also received a wide variety of young investigator nominations and awards from the Chest Foundation, the Respiratory Forum, the American Heart Association, etc. Of interest, the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality, conferred the outstanding article of the year award in 2012. He received the Robert Dawson Evans Junior Faculty Merit Award in 2013, the L. Jack Faling Pulmonary Critical Care Excellence in Teaching Award in 2014, and most recently the 2016 Research Mentor Award, Department of Medicine, Boston University School of Medicine.
Allan has been very active in his professional society and in peer review activities. I turn to him very frequently for Circulation reviews. His reviews are uniformly comprehensive and highly insightful; he is a go-to reviewer for papers involving critical care and pulmonary topics. He also has served as session co-chairs for numerous meetings and has been invited regionally and nationally to speak. His extraordinary peer review abilities have been officially recognized by the Annals of Internal Medicine, which designated him a top-ranked reviewer in 2016.
In addition, Allan enjoys a strong record of funding. He received a Colter Translational Research Partnership Award and an Evans Interdisciplinary Medical Research Award for comparative effectiveness in research in critical illness. He is funded on an NIH K01 that goes from 2013 to 2018. Allan’s K01 was considered so outstanding that his project officer presented his grant at the American Heart Association Quality of Care Outcomes Meeting for a Session on how to write a grant.
Allan has been highly productive with over 50 original research publications, numerous of which are first-author. His most widely cited original research was a paper on stroke and mortality associated with new onset atrial fibrillation in the setting of sepsis, which was published in JAMA in 2011 and has already been Cited by 142. According to Web of Science his 60 articles have been cited without self-citation by 461 articles, for an average citation per item of 8.92, and an h-index of 13.
Allan has contributed extensively to Boston University School of Medicine and Boston Medical Center teaching conferences. He lists more than a dozen separate venues where he has taught students and trainees at all levels on a wide array of pulmonary and critical care topics.
Allanis a very generous and effective mentor. One of his more notable mentoring acts is that he has shared his K01 widely. The grant literally has been emailed to over a dozen BU investigators and early career scientists who have been applying for various mentored training grants.
Allan lists over 15 mentees in his mentoring table. They have included medical students, internal medicine residents, and pulmonary critical care and general internal medicine fellows. His mentees have presented orally 14 times at a variety of national conferences. Most of his mentoring relationshipshave resulted in peer-reviewed publications. His mentees’ scholarship has contributed to them subsequently securing a wide array of prestigious training programs including the BI/Deaconess, and Vanderbilt. A number of them have received travel awards etc.
Another form of his mentoring is via the phenomenally innovative Center for Implementation and Improvement Sciences . He perceived a need to enhance cross-disciplinary implantation science projects, developed a plan, submitted a proposal, and now is working on a highly collaborative center.
In short, Allan is a highly engaged, very successful clinician/scientist, and mentor. He is a true triple threat being acknowledged for both his research productivity with national young investigator awards and funding as well as institutionally as a clinician/educator by receiving his section’s teaching award. His mentoring has been plentiful and extremely effective. Allanalready has enjoyed an extraordinarily productive and successful career as an independent investigator and sought after mentor.
Should you have any questions, please don’t hesitate to contact me.
Respectfully submitted,
Emelia J. Benjamin, MD, ScM, FAHA, FACC
Assistant Provost of Faculty Development, Boston University Medical Campus
Vice Chair, Faculty Development and Diversity, Department of Medicine
Professor of Medicine,Boston University School of Medicine
Professor of Epidemiology, Boston University School of Public Health
The Framingham Heart Study
73 Mount Wayte Ave. Suite 2, Framingham, MA 01702-5827
Email:
EJB/file