NYU Langone Medical Center has announced a $50 million gift from board member and longtime donor Sylvia Hassenfeld and her family to create a comprehensive pediatric hospital.

The 160,000-square-foot Hassenfeld Pediatric Center will include sixty-eight rooms, all of which will be private to help minimize patients' exposure to infection. Scheduled to be completed in 2017, the facility will be located within the new Helen L. and Martin S. Kimmel Pavilion and will include a separate, dedicated entrance featuring a child-friendly lobby; a pre-operative unit with private pre-op and recovery bays; pediatric operating rooms; a catheterization lab; two procedure rooms; dedicated acute pediatric inpatient and pediatric critical care units; and a family center offering orientation activities for patients, space for child-life activities and performances, and support services for families members.

The gift also will be used to support children's health services provided across the center, which boasts more than a hundred and fifty full-time pediatric specialists as well as pediatric nurses, child life specialists, and social workers. For decades, the Hassenfelds — owners of the Hasbro toy company — have supported various programs at the center, including the Stephen D. Hassenfeld Children's Center for Cancer and Blood Disorders.

"This is a momentous occasion for our medical center and New York's children, and we are truly thankful to Sylvia Hassenfeld and her family for their longstanding commitment, dedication, and generosity," said NYU Langone Medical Center dean and CEO Robert I. Grossman. "Their extraordinary gift to create the Hassenfeld Pediatric Center begins a new era of children's health care in New York and helps ensure bright futures for countless children, our most precious patients, and their families."