The Pike Lecture featuring Scott Allen, MD, FACP
Family Detention and the Duty of the Medical Profession
Monday, November 11th, 2019
12:45 – 2:00pm
BU School of Law
Barristers Hall
About the Speaker
Scott Allen is Professor Emeritus of Medicine at the University of California, Riverside School of Medicine where he was formerly Chair of the Department of Medicine and Associate Dean for Academic Affairs.
At age seventeen, responding to news reports of starving Cambodians at the Thai border, he quit high school and flew to Thailand where he found work in the border refugee camps, and where he worked for much of the next five years. After returning to the U.S. and completing medical studies and residency at Brown University, he served in the National Health Service Corps in community health centers in the Mississippi Delta and Rhode Island. He then worked at the Rhode Island Department of Corrections, ultimately serving as state medical director for its jails and prisons, and later worked at the state psychiatric hospital. In 2011, he came to California as a founding faculty member of the new medical school at UC Riverside.
He co-founded the Center for Prisoner Health and Human Rights at Brown University and has served as a Medical Advisor for Physicians for Human Rights for over a decade. At PHR he helped uncover the medical participation in the U.S. torture program and co-authored a number of reports on the harms of the U.S. interrogation program in the post 9/11 era.
In California, inspired by the unmet needs of his own developmentally disabled son, he and his wife co-founded the Access Clinic, a novel primary care clinic for adults with developmental disabilities.
He currently serves as a medical consultant for the Office of Civil Rights and Civil Liberties at the Department of Homeland Security monitoring medical care in immigration detention facilities. In 2018, in response to the family separation and rapid expansion of family detention, he and colleague Dr. Pamela McPherson made protected disclosures to Congress regarding imminent threats to the health and safety of children with the assistance of the Government Accountability Project. For those efforts, he was co-recipient of the 2019 Ridenhour Prize and the 2019 Physicians for Human Rights Award.
The Pike Lecture on Health Law is held in honor of BU Law alumnus Neal Pike (‘37), a distinguished lawyer and lifelong advocate for individuals with disabilities.