Founders

Ron M. Walls is Executive Vice President and Chief Operating Officer at Brigham Health and the Neskey Family Professor of Emergency Medicine at Harvard Medical School. He was the original Editor-in-Chief of what is now the Walls Manual of Emergency Airway Management (5e), and is Senior Editor of Rosen’s Emergency Medicine: Concepts and Clinical Practice. He is a peer reviewer for The New England Journal of Medicine, the six emergency medicine journals in North America and Europe and the journal, Anesthesia.

Dr. Walls has researched, published and taught in the area of Emergency Medicine, with an emphasis on emergency airway management, for more than twenty years. He has been a regular speaker at the ACEP Annual Scientific Assembly and at numerous regional, national and international meetings. Dr. Walls was honored with the American College of Emergency Physicians Outstanding Contributions to Education Award in 2007, the Society for Academic Emergency Medicine’s Hal Jayne Academic Excellence Award in 2008 and the American Academy of Emergency Medicine’s David K. Wagner Award in 2009.

He was the principle investigator of NEAR (National Emergency Airway Registry), a multi-center, international emergency airway research project that has studied over 16,000 Emergency Department intubations in over 30 centers. Dr. Walls has over 180 scientific publications, including 19 textbooks. He has been an invited Visiting Professor at over 30 institutions.

Michael F. Murphy is Professor Emeritus at University of Alberta. He has designed and implemented EMS systems in eastern Canada and the Caribbean. He has also edited the Manual of Emergency Airway Management (Walls Murphy) and Difficult and Failed Airway Management (Hung Murphy).

Dr. Murphy’s advice to students is to always learn from masters, and focus on people who are truly doing things. He got into teaching so he could expand the impact of his work. “I have always felt I could save more lives by teaching,” he says. He finds the best part of his job to be learning that what he taught ended up saving a life.

“I get a great deal of reward in knowing that I have contributed to the next generation of airway educators, researchers and managers,” he says.

Robert C. Luten has dedicated his career to the advancement of pediatric emergency care. He is considered a pioneer in the specialty of pediatric emergency medicine and was a founding board member of that specialty. He has taken a leadership role in childhood emergency initiatives in the American Academy of Pediatrics, the American Red Cross, the American Heart Association, the American College of Emergency Physicians and other national organizations.

He was a charter member of the Pediatric Subcommittee on Childhood Resuscitation of the American Heart Association, co-author and co-founder of PALS and leading author and editor of APLS jointly sponsored by the American College of Emergency Physicians and the American Academy of Pediatrics. He is a past president of the Society for Pediatric Emergency Medicine.

Dr. Luten has edited several textbooks and is widely published in the area of childhood emergencies. He is the author and principal instructor of the pediatric section of The Difficult Airway Course: Emergency. As creator and author of the studies which formed the basis of the Broselow Tape and the Broselow-Luten Color Coding Kids System, Dr. Luten has dramatically improved the practice of pediatric emergency medicine over the course of his career.

Dr. Luten is currently professor of Pediatrics and Emergency Medicine at the University of Florida, Shands in Jacksonville, FL. He is board certified in Emergency Medicine, Pediatrics, and Pediatric Emergency Medicine.