VIDEO: Lown Institute president Dr. Vikas Saini presents the 2026 BLASR award to Dr. Chanelle Diaz
Lown Institute president Dr. Vikas Saini presents the 2026 Bernard Lown Award for Social Responsibility to Dr. Chanelle Diaz for her outstanding leadership in advancing the health and dignity of those held in immigration detention through pro bono forensic medical evaluations, groundbreaking research, outspoken public advocacy, and a commitment to cultivating the next generation of socially responsible clinicians.
“Dr. Diaz doesn’t turn away. And like so many others and like the other Americans I love, her work is deeply American and matters to us all because it shapes the kind of country we live in that our children live in.”
Dr. Vikas Saini
Good evening everyone. I hope you’re enjoying the dinner and I hope you had a good time outside talking at the cocktail party. We’re going to get started now.
Tonight is the fifth annual Bernard Lown Award for Social Responsibility dinner. We call it BLASR in the Lown staff and it’s our version of the Oscar – the BLASR, a trailblazer, a milestone. So, this five-year anniversary got me thinking.
You’ve heard the names that Zach just outlined of past winners. All the past winners have been immigrants or the children of immigrants. Bernard Lown was an immigrant. Turns out I’m an immigrant, too.
I came to the US from India when I was four. It was 1958. Columbus, Ohio. It was a football crazy town even then. There were only a handful of Indians and no kids my age. I learned English over four weeks in West Virginia on a family farm of Charlie Brass, a grad school buddy of my father’s who had fought in New Guinea and the Philippines. He went to college on the GI Bill and then he was doing grad school. His family had a record of military service going back generations and he embraced our family in Columbus. I grew up listen boy I grew up listening to Skeeter Davis, Elvis Presley, Chubby Checker, Johnny Cash, all before the Beatles, of course. I tell you all of this because I think I have a pretty good sense of what the golden age of middle America was like for boomers like me, including many who now want to make America great again. I think I actually get it.
Whenever I return to the country after being away for a while, I’m struck with the vibe, the culture. There’s an easy egalitarianism and informality like nowhere else. My father took a leave of absence from his job at Punjab University to go to Columbus for grad school for a Ph.D. He had no intention of staying and neither did my mom, by the way. Okay, she’s actually here with us now in the back. She got her Ph.D. as well. We didn’t expect to stay. My dad went back to India and couldn’t make a go of it. He couldn’t hack it. The nepotism, the cronyism, the cast politics, the corruption, it was actually too much for him to bear. And he came back. As I like to say to my friends, once you’ve tasted the fruits of the enlightenment and a democratic revolution, it’s impossible to go back.
When we came, India was newly independent and full of hope. John F. Kennedy was vocal about the world of European colonialism belonging in the dust bin of history. America’s power and prestige supporting anti-colonial sentiment. That was electric. It’s kind of hard to imagine that today. My mom was struck by the way Americans loved making fun of the pomposity of the Brits, especially the royal families. That’s also changed a little. But in those days, that irreverence was enchanting to folks like us, and it made being here in a strange land a lot easier. That’s just one family’s experience, but I have other data points.
50 years later at Harvard, I was having a private chat with the head of department who’d come from the Karolinska Institute in Sweden. You know, the place where they pick Nobel Prize winners in medicine. I asked him how Harvard compared because Karolinska is also a big world-renowned place. I expected a complicated answer with a long pros cons list. Instead, I was quite struck to hear him say there is no comparison. The students here, the culture, the atmosphere, there’s nothing like it anywhere else in the world. Specifically the willingness to criticize ideas, the openness to unorthodox ways of thinking, the refusal to place professors on a pedestal, the intellectual egalitarianism. There’s that word again.
So I just wanted to remind you all, remind us all though there is much too much really that needs fixing in this country. There are so many ways this is a remarkable country. The embers of the revolutionary fire are still glowing under the ashes. So here in New England, the Patriots are a fixture. It’s a roughly $9 billion business platform that occupies the commanding heights of public life. About as mainstream as you can get. The first New England patriots, the revolutionaries, were very different. They’re now wrapped up in all sorts of myth-making to legitimize a regime. But if you go back and read the history carefully and look at that, what you discover is that those grassroots revolutionaries were tough as nails and angry and activist and actually wouldn’t take shit from anybody. Not even the high and mighty amongst their own here in Massachusetts. The proof, the grassroots voted down the Constitution three times before the wealthy elites just railroaded it through. Look that up.
So the America I love is the America of people like that. Troublemakers like Thorough. Extremists like John Brown, Frederick Douglas as much founding father as any. Fred Hampton, Fanny Liu Hamer. I mean Fanny Liu Hamer. Unbelievable. Walter Reuther, the list goes on. And not just in the past, but in the here and now. The America I love is overflowing with the Americans I love. activists, critics, outcasts, loud mouths, people who think different, people who won’t take no for an answer. The ones who don’t fear the future but face it without flinching.
There’s a lot to debate about immigration policy in this country. For instance, my own view is that when you actually look up the numbers, the numbers of illegal immigrants or undocumented persons if you prefer in the US, those numbers did shoot up dramatically in the Biden years from roughly 10 million in 2019 to 14 million. 40% increase over four years. That’s according to the Pew Research. And while Democrats were weak-kneed and incoherent on the issue, Trump, DeSantis, and Abbott played it like masters. And now we have Trump. But at what cost?
The vast majority of this country believes we are on the wrong track and does not support the wholesale detention of people who’ve done nothing wrong. They don’t like these so-called detention facilities. If you look up the history of the late 19th century in Cuba and South Africa, you’ll find these facilities had another name. They were called concentration camps. That’s really what they are. So, Americans do not support these policies, but it’s going to take a new kind of leadership to fix this.
Dr. Chanelle Diaz, would you like to come up?
Dr. Dr. Chanelle Diaz grew up in the Miami area. She decided to be a doctor when she was eight. She’s the first in her family to attend a four-year college, a quite a college. She went to Williams, majored in political science. She interned at the World Health Organization. She worked as an HIV counselor at Miami Dade County and then in Uganda at an HIV clinic.
As a med student, she co-founded the Florida Needle Exchange Initiative and worked on it for years. With other students, she like Bernard Lown before her figured out how to leverage high principle into effective action. After persistent campaigning, Chanelle and her team got the Florida legislature to pass a statewide needle exchange program. Lobbying helped and so did a convincing analytic paper on the costs. A statewide needle exchange program in Florida of all places, spearheaded by med students. So, anyone who knows even a little bit about Florida politics will understand this was an act of practical tactical brilliance.
She began working on immigration issues when she went to the Bronx for her residency. She volunteered as an asylum counselor. She joined the medical providers network and began doing medical assessments of detained immigrants. She documented their medical needs. She also designed a teaching course for her fellow residents. She published op-eds. She helped release a groundbreaking report on preventable deaths in detention. And she’s been visiting and bearing witness to the conditions of people in detention throughout. Need I say more?
Clearly, she’s someone who doesn’t quit through thick and thin. You can get a good sense of all of that from her resume. But when I spoke to her for the first time, right away I saw something else.
Bernard Lown, for a guy with such a strong ego, was remarkably, remarkably empathetic. People would tell me, his patients would tell me that they felt like he had seen right into them and was lifting them up. I’m not exaggerating. and he could sort of feel their psychological distress and did not hesitate to step in. When I met Dr. Diaz for the first time and I started talking to her, that’s what struck me the most. Something you can’t really detect on a resume. She is a true empath.
It’s a transcendent trait for a doctor and I’m sure her patients adore her, but it can’t always be easy and it’s really hard not to look away sometimes. Dr. Diaz doesn’t turn away. And like so many others and like the other Americans I love, her work is deeply American and matters to us all because it shapes the kind of country we live in that our children live in.
And although the Bernard Lown Award singles out individuals, one message I’ll leave you with tonight is that we’re surrounded by good people who are doing the right thing.
A third of the signers of the Declaration of Independence were foreign born or the sons of immigrants. They turned the world upside down because they knew they wanted a different one. This is a moment when we need more like them. People to help the country discover a new politics, a politics of solidarity, of human empathy, of human survival. We need people like Chanelle Diaz to help us find the way. Chanelle, what an honor it is for me to present the Bernard Lown Award.