Professor Walker is the director of the Feinstein International Famine Center at Tufts University, and his research interests are in the areas of climate change and disasters, humanitarian accountability, and organizational change to address disaster preparation and response needs. He played a major role in managing the relief response to the 1984-85 famine in the Sudan, including the provision of emergency water supplies to over 400,000 Ethiopian refugees. In 1993, he founded the annual World Disasters Report which has now become one of the standard reference texts in the humanitarian business. Prior to his appointment at Tufts, Dr. Walker worked in Bangkok, managing the development and emergency programming of the Red Cross across the eleven countries of South East Asia.