Children’s National’s Walter Reed campus receives $5M gift from Boeing

Children's National Hospital's Research and Innovation Campus at Walter Reed is slated to deliver in December 2020.

Elkus Manfredi Architects | Array Architects

By Sara Gilgore - Staff Reporter

October 21, 2020, 01:19pm EDT

Children’s National Hospital has received $5 million from The Boeing Co. (NYSE: BA).

The gift, announced Wednesday, will support pediatric research at the health system’s Research and Innovation Campus on the former Walter Reed Army Medical Center in D.C., now under construction and slated to deliver in December.

The pediatric nonprofit will dub its auditorium “The Boeing Auditorium,” a space designed to support the goal of becoming “the destination for discussion about how to best address the next big health care challenges facing children and families,” said Dr. Kurt Newman, president and CEO of Children’s National, in a statement.

That auditorium, totaling 3,200 square feet, will be inside the project’s conference center. That space will host experts, scientists, medical leaders and diplomats to facilitate discussion and work around pediatric research, Children’s said.

Chicago-based Boeing joins a growing lineup of partners Children’s has tapped for the project. That list includes Johnson & Johnson Innovation, which is bringing its JLabs incubator to the property; and Virginia Tech, which is setting up its first District location with a biomedical research complex. Children’s is also working with the National Institutes of Health, the Food and Drug Administration, the U.S. Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority, Cerner, Amazon Web Services, Microsoft, the National Organization of Rare Diseases and D.C. government, it said in a release.

“Children's National Hospital’s enduring mission of positively impacting the lives of our youngest community members is especially important today,” said Boeing President and CEO David Calhoun in a statement. “We’re honored to join other national and community partners to advance this work through the establishment of their Research and Innovation Campus.”

The $5 million contribution follows the publicly traded aerospace company’s nearly $2 million donation to support children’s health care and research through Children’s National’s Chance for Life program and annual ball.

Children’s National broke ground on the Walter Reed campus in late 2018, with a vision to transform 12 acres on the 110-acre site into a hub for precision medicine and genomic research. The $200 million project also includes a pediatric outpatient center when it completes at the end of 2020.

Work has included renovating an existing 360,000-square-foot building, the former Armed Forces Institute of Pathology; redeveloping about 158,000 square feet of the site’s southern portion; and revamping a 30,000-square-foot ambulatory clinic and 18,000-square-foot auditorium.

The system is planning a phased move to the campus, starting with the Rare Disease Institute, which will start seeing patients in January 2021. Then Children’s primary care department will start seeing patients and the Center for Genetic Medicine Research will move into the new Children’s National Research Institute building on the campus between July and September. By the end of 2025, the organization expects to have about 700 people working on the campus.

Here’s a look back at the project’s progress:

Renderings: Children's National at Walter Reed

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Children's National will renovate and repurpose about 12 acres on the Walter Reed site. This is an overview.