LifeBridge Heath receives largest individual donation with $10M gift

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Lifebridge Health Tuesday received a $10 million gift from Ellen W.P. Wasserman, the largest gift from an individual in the 26-year history of the Baltimore-based health care system.

The donation will create an endowment to fund scholarships for medical students training at the Regional Medical Campus (RMC) at Sinai Hospital, a partnership with The George Washington University School of Medicine & Health Sciences (GW SMHS).

The gift brings her lifetime donations to LifeBridge Health to about $24 million, with her previous gifts focused primarily on children. This includes endowing the Ellen W.P. Wasserman chair of pediatrics position at the Herman & Walter Samuelson Children’s Hospital at Sinai.

Wasserman, who turned 101 in March, became an emeritus member of the LifeBridge Health board in 2022. She served on the Sinai Hospital board of directors for nearly 20 years and was a founding member of the LifeBridge Health board in 1998.

GW’s RMC students spend their third and fourth years of medical school in clinical rotations at Sinai Hospital of Baltimore, training and working in a community-focused health system. One goal of the RMC is to grow the next generation physicians who may one day practice in the Baltimore region.

In their training at Sinai, the students help care for many patients who come from underserved communities, where economic and social disparities can negatively affect their health. The RMC has a focus on primary care and community-based medicine.

The RMC program is now in its second full year with 15 GW SMHS students currently training at Sinai. There will be a total of 60 students (30 third year and 30 fourth year) when the program is at full capacity. The incoming GW SMHS class starting medical school this fall already has 30 first-year students who will come to the RMC in Baltimore for their clinical rotations in April 2026 Through the endowment, these students will receive tuition scholarships of $10,000 annually and will be known as Wasserman Scholars.

During their time at Sinai, the third-year students rotate through all medical specialties, ranging from family medicine and internal medicine to pediatrics, psychiatry, obstetrics/gynecology, neurology, surgery and more. They work alongside doctors, nurses and other team members on hospital units, in physician clinics and in the community. Fourth-year students can take electives unique to the RMC, such as population health, value-based care and technology/digital health.

RMC students do their first two years of medical classroom coursework at the GW School of Medicine and Health Sciences’ campus in Washington before coming to Baltimore for their final two years of medical school.