Physician and Ethicist Dr. Lachlan Forrow to Receive Albert Schweitzer Fellowship's Lifetime Achievement Award

TULSA, Okla., Nov. 6, 2026 — The Albert Schweitzer Fellowship (ASF), a community impact program for graduate and professional students to identify and address unmet health needs and train leaders for enduring impact, will present its inaugural Lifetime Achievement Award to Lachlan Forrow, MD (Fellow for Life '82, Board Chair Emeritus) during its 2026 National Leadership Summit, taking place in Tulsa, OK from Nov. 5–8. The award recognizes Dr. Forrow's lifelong contributions to bioethics, palliative care, and medical humanism.

For more than four decades, Dr. Forrow has embodied the idea at the heart of Albert Schweitzer's legacy: that compassion must be practiced, not just professed. As a senior MD student at Harvard Medical School in 1982, he spent three months at the Albert Schweitzer Hospital in Lambaréné, Gabon, as a Schweitzer Fellow, an experience that shaped his lifelong commitment to service.

"There is no one more fitting to honor at our 35th anniversary," said Rachel Gold, ASF's National Executive Director. "Under Lachlan's leadership, ASF grew from a single Boston program into a national network by mentoring Fellows one at a time and working in tandem with colleagues across the country who shared his vision for service and leadership. Thirty-five years later, 5,000+ Fellows have been transforming healthcare principles into tangible, community-rooted health equity efforts across the nation."

Dr. Forrow spent the majority of his career as a physician at Boston's Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center (BIDMC), where he founded and directed the ethics and palliative care programs, shaping how clinicians care for patients facing serious illness. He was a member of the Harvard Medical School faculty at BIDMC until his retirement in 2020, after which he served until 2025 as a senior fellow at the HMS Center for Bioethics, part-time lecturer in the HMS Department of Global Health and Social Medicine, and faculty associate at the Safra Center for Ethics at Harvard University.

"Lachlan Forrow's commitment to advancing health and humanism in medicine makes him most deserving of this recognition," said Rebecca Weintraub Brendel, MD, JD, director of the HMS Center for Bioethics and the Frances Glessner Lee Associate Professor of Global Health and Social Medicine in the Field of Legal Medicine and an associate professor of medicine at HMS. "He has cultivated an environment of medical learning and care grounded in humility and compassion for his students, house staff, and colleagues in practice alike over more than 40 years. He has shaped the clinical and ethics communities at Harvard Medical School immeasurably by reliably asking the first question in nearly every setting — and providing the final reflection — on the most challenging clinical cases and ethical quandaries."

He is past board chair/CEO of International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War (a 1985 Nobel Peace laureate organization), and was actively involved with the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons (a 2017 Nobel Peace laureate organization). As longtime Chair of ASF, he guided the Fellowship's growth into a national network, with BIDMC serving as ASF's National Office from 1992 through 2025.

"Whatever I've contributed to ASF is through the Fellows themselves," said Dr. Lachlan Forrow, Board Chair Emeritus of ASF. "As a Lambaréné Schweitzer Fellow in 1982, working as a medical student at the Schweitzer Hospital in Africa, I learned that Schweitzer-spirited service is not episodic, it is a profoundly-rewarding lifelong pursuit. It is a great honor to be recognized by ASF, which today selects and supports over 200 new Schweitzer Fellows every year, and already over 5,000 Schweitzer Fellows for Life who continue to serve their communities, across the country and the world, long after their initial Schweitzer Fellowship year ends."

Supporters of Dr. Albert Schweitzer established the Fellowship in the United States in 1940 to provide material and financial support for his hospital in Lambaréné, Gabon, especially as World War II disrupted supply lines to Africa. Their work carries on the humanitarian legacy and "reverence for life" philosophy of Dr. Albert Schweitzer to improve community health by developing graduate students across healthcare, law, social work, and public health to partner with under-resourced communities to solve pressing health disparities.

Since its U.S. founding in Boston in 1991, ASF has supported more than 5,000 Fellows, who serve about 23,000 community members each year across the US. There are near 250 ASF Fellows in the current cohort, advancing critical projects such as:

• Establishing mobile clinics providing wound care for people experiencing homelessness in Winston-Salem, North Carolina
• Offering dental care for individuals recovering from substance use disorders in San Francisco
• Developing musical programming to reduce social isolation among older adults in Vermont
• Improving maternal mental health outcomes through a community-centered perinatal support program in Tulsa, OK

Media Contact:
Erin Mahoney
9172132935
[email protected]

SOURCE The Albert Schweitzer Fellowship