Every year, PETA presents the Nanci Alexander Activist Award to a wonderful individual whose contributions to animal rights have changed the world.
The award’s namesake, Nanci Alexander, has been with PETA since the very beginning and is one of our honorary directors. She truly encompasses every possible definition of an activist. She founded both the Animal Rights Foundation of Florida and the nation’s first gourmet vegan restaurant, Sublime. She’s an inspiration to all her fellow PETA teammates.
This year, we’re excited to recognize Dr. John Pawlowski as the Nanci Alexander Activist Award recipient.
Over the years, he has fulfilled many roles to which he’s brought his extraordinary intellect, dedication, and compassion, including being the director of the Division of Thoracic Anesthesia at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, the co-director of the Shapiro Simulation and Skills Center, an assistant professor at Harvard Medical School, and a valued PETA member.
Dr. Pawlowski co-authored PETA’s chapter in the groundbreaking book titled Animal Experimentation: Working Towards a Paradigm Change, which features contributions from 51 experts from around the world, and he co-authored a paper with PETA published in the journal Simulation in Healthcare about the paradigm shift away from the use of animals in biomedical education. He traveled to India to speak at PETA India’s workshops around the country for replacing the use of animals in undergraduate medical education, which helped in later securing a ban on this practice nationwide.
Dr. Pawlowski penned an op-ed urging the Medical Council of India to end the use of animals for postgraduate medical training and wrote to officials in Taiwan urging an end to using animals for undergraduate medical training. He’s also been a strong advocate for replacing the use of pigs and goats in cruel military trauma training drills, and he helped PETA end the U.S. Army’s chemical casualty drills on monkeys. He’s actively changing the way the medical community approaches experiments on animals and paving the way for a world in which animal experiments are relegated to the history books.
Thank you for your advocacy and expertise, Dr. Pawlowski, and congratulations on this award.
