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
Thank you Zach.
Tonight is the fifth annual BLASR dinner. A milestone. That got me thinking. The winners so far have all been immigrants or the children of recent immigrants. Bernard Lown was an immigrant.
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 there then — and no kids my age. I learned English over four weeks in West Virginia, on the family farm of Charlie Brass, a grad school buddy of my dad’s. Charlie had fought in New Guinea and the Philippines. He went to college on the GI Bill. His family had a record of military service going back generations. He embraced us like family. In Columbus I grew up listening to Skeeter Davis, Elvis Presley, Chubby Checker, Johnny Cash (before the Beatles upended everything, of course!).
I tell you all 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 of those who now want to make America Great again. I get it.
Whenever I return to the country after being away for awhile, I’m struck with the vibe, the culture. There’s an easy egalitarianism, an informality like nowhere else.
My father took a leave of absence from his job at Punjab University to go to Columbus for PhD. He had no intention of staying. (Neither did my mom BTW — she’s here with us here tonight.) My dad was a brilliant, gentle soul. When he returned to India and tried to make a go of it, he couldn’t hack it — the nepotism, cronyism, caste politics, corruption. It was too much to bear, so he came back here. As I like to say, once you’ve tasted the fruits of the Enlightenment and a democratic revolution, it’s nearly impossible to go back.
When we came India was newly independent and full of hope. John F Kennedy was vocal about leaving the world of European colonialism behind! America’s power and prestige supporting anti-colonial sentiment — the effect is hard to imagine today. It was electric.
My mom was struck that Americans loved making fun of the pomposity of the Brits, especially, the Royal Family. She found the irreverence enchanting and it made being 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 had come from the Karolinska Institute in Sweden — you know, the place where they pick the winners of the Nobel Prize in Medicine. I asked him how Harvard compared, since Karolinska is also a big, world-renowned place. I expected a complicated list of pros and cons. Instead, I was astonished to hear him say — “there’s 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 an exalted pedestal, the intellectual egalitarianism (there’s that word again).
I just wanted to remind you, remind us all — though there is much — too much that needs fixing, there are so many ways this is a remarkable country. The embers of the revolutionary fire are still glowing under the ashes.
Here in New England the Patriots are a fixture, a roughly nine Billion dollar business platform that occupies the commanding heights of public life in this town. About as mainstream as you can get.
The first New England patriots — the revolutionaries — were different. They’re now wrapped up in all sorts of myth-making to legitimize a regime. But if you go back and read that history carefully, what you discover is that those grassroots revolutionaries were tough and angry and activist and wouldn’t take shit from anyone, not even the high and mighty amongst their own, here in Massachusetts. For example, the grassroots voted down the draft constitution three times, before the wealthy elites just steamrollered it through.
The America I love is full of people like that. Troublemakers like Thoreau, extremists like John Brown, Frederick Douglass, as much a founding father as any, Susan B Anthony. Fred Hampton, Fannie Lou Hamer, oh! Fannie Lou Hamer! Walter Reuther — the list goes on and 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, outcastes, 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 at the numbers of illegal immigrants, undocumented persons, if you prefer, in the US, those numbers did shoot up a disturbing amount in the Biden years — from roughly 10M in 2019 to 14 M in 2024 (according to Pew Research) And while the 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 have 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 such facilities had another name — they were called concentration camps. And that’s really what they are.
Americans do not support these policies. But it’s going to take new kinds of leadership to fix this.
Chanelle, please come up and join me.
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 — and what a college! She went to Williams and majored in political science. She interned at the World Health Organization, she worked as an HIV counselor at the Miami-Dade County Health Department and 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 state-wide needle exchange bill. Lobbying helped — so did a convincing analytic paper on the costs.
A state-wide needle exchange program! In Florida of all places! Spear-headed by med students! Anyone who knows even a little bit about Florida politics will understand that 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 evaluator. She joined the Medical Providers Network (MPN) and began doing medical assessments for 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 people in detention face 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, Bernard was remarkably, remarkably empathetic. Patients would tell me that they felt like he had seen right into them and was lifting them up. He could feel their psychological distress, almost directly, and didn’t hesitate to step in.
When I met Dr Diaz for the first time and started talking to her, that’s what struck me the most — something you just can’t detect on a resume. She is a true EMPATH. It’s a transcendent trait for a doctor. I’m sure her patients adore her for it. But. it can’t always be easy. It’s really hard NOT to look away sometimes, when seeing grievous suffering.
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 though the Bernard Lown Award singles out individuals, one message I’ll leave you with tonight is that we are 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 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 to you the Bernard Lown Award!