Adjunct Professor
Department of Neurosurgery, University of Alabama at Birmingham
Ormond Beach, Florida, United States
BEVERLY C. WALTERS, M.D., M.Sc., FRCSC, FACS
Dr. Walters is a retired neurosurgeon who had a practice in general neurosurgery,
focusing on spine, brachial plexus, and peripheral nerve, last affiliated with most
hospitals in Rhode Island, as an Associate Professor of Neurosurgery at Brown
University. She was trained at the University of Toronto and is certified by the
Royal College of Physicians and Surgeons of Canada, and was the first female
neurosurgeon on the faculty of the University of Toronto and the first head of the
Department of Surgery’s Clinical Epidemiology. She was a Clinical Professor of
Neurological Surgery at New York University, Adjunct Professor of Surgery at the
Uniformed Services University of the Health Sciences in Bathesda, and a Visiting
Professor at the University of Zagreb in Croatia. She was also a frequent speaker at
national and international neurosurgical meetings. She performed many surgical
procedures each year over 40 years of practice, including NASA astronauts and other
famous people.
Her experience in clinical research involves the design and implementation of randomized controlled trials, casecontrol
studies, meta-analyses, and she has written extensively on study design and assessment of the quality of
medical literature, including being the author/co-author of fourteen monographs on critical appraisal, as well as
editorials and book chapters on statistical and study design aspects of neurosurgical research. She has extensive
experience in survey methodology and has developed a statistical technique for use in generating evidence for use in
algorithms when randomized controlled trials cannot be done. She has been a lecturer, tutor, and course designer
for several educational programs on critical appraisal of the medical literature for practicing clinicians, graduate
students, postgraduate trainees, and medical students.
She was the original and long-standing chairperson of the Practice Guidelines Committee of the American
Association of Neurological Surgeons in the past, a member of the Outcomes Committee of the AANS/CNS, the
Committee for the Assessment of Quality of the AANS/CNS, the Executive Committee of the CNS, and a Governor
of the American College of Surgeons. Her guidelines activities have included the development of the Guidelines
for the Management of Severe Head Injury, the Guidelines for Prehospital Management of Traumatic Brain Injury,
Guidelines for Penetrating Brain Injury, Spinal Cord Injury Guidelines (X 2), and the Guidelines for the Treatment
of Low Back Pain. She has published, as a co-author, usually methodologist) more guidelines than any other single
neurosurgeon. She has given courses on guideline development, and writes frequently on outcome measurement for
neurosurgeons. She was cited as a leader in the development of SCI guidelines in the United States Congress
(Congressional Record.) In addition, she has been involved with research on women in medicine and surgery,
including undergraduate medical education, and is author or co-author of several publications on this topic,
including the Annotated Bibliography of Women in Medicine. Her evidence-based textbook on evidence-based
neurosurgery (with Stephen Haines) was the first ever published.
As of January 2023, Dr. Walters has 11,224 citations, an h-index of 49, and an i10 index of 126.
(PS1) Richard Schneider Lecture
Saturday, April 22, 2023
9:10am – 9:19am PST
Disclosure(s): No financial relationships to disclose