After graduating in medicine and surgery from the University of NSW in 1982, Conjoint  Associate Professor Paul Walker was awarded his Fellowship of the Royal Australasian College of Surgeons in 1991.

Following this he spent time at the Children’s Memorial Hospital in Chicago USA, and then was the Fellow in Paediatric Otolaryngology at the Hospital for Sick Children, Toronto, Canada, 1991-1992. At the Hospital for Sick Children he focused on acquiring a wide range of skills in both the operative and the non-operative management of disorders affecting the ear, nose, and throat in children.

He has had a practice in Newcastle exclusively for the care of children, since 1992. He was elected to the prestigious American Society of Pediatric Otolaryngology in 1995. He gained his Fellowship of the American College of Surgeons in 2000. He is President-elect of the Australian and New Zealand Society of Paediatric Otolaryngologists. He is a member of the RACS Section of Academic Surgery, the RACS Ethics Committee, and the Australian Association of Bioethics and Health Law.

To date he has published more than 90 scientific papers, books and book chapters. His interests have been in airway obstruction and airway reconstruction, and tonsillar and adenoid disease. He established the paediatric cochlear implant programme in the Hunter.

In 2016 he was awarded  his Doctor of Philosophy from the University of Newcastle, examining moral decision-making in medicine, and its implications for medical education. In 2017 his book (with Terry Lovat) Life and Death Decisions in the Clinical Setting: Moral Decision-making through Discourse Consensus was published by Springer.