$10 million gift from Lynda Carter will create a next‑generation surgical training hub

A $10 million gift from the Robert and Lynda Carter Altman Family Foundation will create a next‑generation surgical training hub at MedStar Georgetown University Hospital in Washington, D.C., honoring the life and legacy of attorney and business leader Robert A. Altman through an investment designed to improve how surgeons learn—and how patients are cared for—for decades to come.

The commitment establishes the Robert A. Altman Center for Surgical Education at MedStar Georgetown, a major teaching and referral hospital serving the Washington region and neighboring communities in Maryland and Virginia.

The Center is being launched by award‑winning actress, singer‑songwriter, and advocate Lynda Carter through the family foundation she created in 2023 in honor of her husband, who died in 2021 from secondary acute myeloid leukemia, a rare and aggressive blood cancer.

Hospital leaders characterize the Altman gift as “transformational” support that will allow Georgetown to dramatically expand hands‑on training in complex, cutting-edge surgical techniques—work they say will translate directly into more skilled surgical teams, greater capacity, and safer care for patients across the D.C. metropolitan area.

The Robert A. Altman Center for Surgical Education is being designed as an integrated education platform rather than a single physical lab, with programming built around four core pillars: technical skills training, non‑technical skills training, educational research, and transdisciplinary collaboration.

Under the leadership of Patrick Jackson, MD, chief of the Division of General Surgery at MedStar Georgetown, the Center will offer training to medical students, residents, fellows, and attending surgeons, blending simulation, operating‑room–based teaching, and structured team exercises.

A new simulation-based facility will anchor the Center’s technical curriculum, providing realistic environments where trainees can practice advanced procedures, refine their skills, and rehearse complex cases before they ever reach a living patient. Hospital officials say this focus on repetition and realism is intended to shorten the learning curve for intricate operations, reduce complications, and allow busy surgical teams to adopt innovative techniques more quickly and safely.

Beyond surgical dexterity, the Center’s agenda explicitly elevates non‑technical skills—such as communication, leadership, situational awareness, and teamwork—as essential competencies for contemporary operating rooms. Structured team‑training modules will immerse surgeons, anesthesiologists, nurses, and other professionals in high‑stakes scenarios that mirror real emergencies, with a focus on decision‑making under pressure and coordinated responses to complications.

Educational research will run alongside this training, allowing faculty to rigorously study what teaching methods work best and to disseminate findings to the wider surgical community. Transdisciplinary collaboration, meanwhile, will connect the Center with experts in fields such as engineering, data science, and human factors, aiming to spur the development of new tools, protocols, and technologies that can be tested and refined in the simulation environment before entering routine clinical use.

As part of the gift, Dr. Jackson will be appointed the inaugural holder of the Robert A. Altman Endowed Chair of Surgery at MedStar Georgetown, the first endowed chair designated by MedStar Health.

This endowed position will strengthen the center’s leadership and ensure long-term support for its educational and research mission, providing stable funding to recruit talent, develop curricula, and adapt programming as surgical practice evolves. MedStar Georgetown’s president, Lisa M. Boyle, MD, FACS, who also serves as a senior vice president for MedStar Health, publicly thanked the Altman family for what she called an “incredible opportunity to shape the future of surgery,” pledging that every trainee who passes through the center will be educated with the rigor and care that reflect the family’s values.

In statements shared by the hospital system and on social media, MedStar leaders have framed the impact of the gift in human terms, emphasizing that better‑trained surgeons will “save lives” and give families “more time together” throughout the wider region.

The new Center also carries particular significance for surrounding communities that rely on MedStar Georgetown for complex operations unavailable at smaller hospitals. The hospital serves as a major referral destination for patients across the District of Columbia and from Southern Maryland counties such as Charles, St. Mary’s, and Calvert, where residents often travel to Georgetown for specialized surgical care.

By expanding training capacity and surgical expertise at Georgetown, the Altman gift is expected to strengthen the region’s overall surgical infrastructure, allowing more patients to be treated closer to home and supporting community hospitals that depend on Georgetown’s specialists and academic programs. MedStar officials note that as demographic shifts and medical advances drive demand for more complex procedures, investing in surgical education is a critical, often less visible, component of regional health equity.

For Carter, the gift continues a philanthropic trajectory that closely mirrors her family’s personal journey with blood cancer. The Robert & Lynda Carter Altman Family Foundation, which received its federal tax‑exempt status in 2023, reported assets of more than $220 million and nearly $6 million in grants in its early years, with a portfolio focused on blood cancer research and women’s history.

Past beneficiaries have included the Translational Genomics Research Institute (TGen), now part of City of Hope, where Carter has supported precision-medicine efforts in myelofibrosis and secondary acute myeloid leukemia—the disease that took her husband’s life—as well as the Smithsonian’s American Women’s History Museum, reflecting her long-standing advocacy for women’s representation and storytelling.

Advisors note that the foundation tends to favor large, multi‑year commitments to prominent institutions and that Carter often deepens her engagement by serving in advisory or governance roles, signaling a preference for sustained partnerships over one‑off gifts.

In that context, the MedStar Georgetown commitment marks both a continuation and an expansion of the foundation’s approach: while previous grants have concentrated on discovery‑stage research and cultural institutions, this latest gift is squarely aimed at the clinical “front lines,” where research insights and technical advances meet real‑world patients in operating rooms.

By supporting a training ecosystem rather than a single disease program, the gift helps the Altman Center reach a wide range of surgical specialties—from oncology and transplantation to trauma and minimally invasive procedures—ultimately benefiting more patients. Carter and MedStar leaders have described the center as a living memorial to Robert Altman, one that channels the grief of his loss into an enduring infrastructure for healing and innovation.

The hope, they suggest, is that the skills honed under his name will spare other families from similar heartbreak, reinforcing the idea that personal philanthropy, at scale, can reshape not only the contours of medical education but the expectations communities have for the quality and safety of the care they receive.