Stanley C. Middleman, the Philadelphia-born founder and CEO of Freedom Mortgage — one of the nation’s largest mortgage lenders and a leading Ginnie Mae servicer and VA and FHA lender, focused on expanding homeownership for military families, veterans, first-time homebuyers, and underserved communities — announced a transformational gift to Penn Medicine on September 10, 2026 that creates both the Middleman Center, a new research facility anchoring the western edge of Penn Medicine’s campus, and the Middleman Fund, an ongoing source of research funding; the university did not disclose the gift’s dollar amount.
It’s Middleman’s first major philanthropic commitment to Penn Medicine, where he recently joined the Corporate Council as an adviser and advocate. Middleman, who also serves as Vice Chairman of the Philadelphia Phillies and Alternate Governor of the NBA’s Portland Trail Blazers, and has previously supported Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia and Temple University’s Fox School of Business — his alma mater — tied the gift directly to his hometown roots: “I was born and raised in Philadelphia, and I’m proud to support Penn Medicine and the extraordinary work being done there to advance medicine and improve people’s lives. My hope is that the Middleman Fund will fuel the development of lifesaving therapies and new approaches to treating patients, and that the Middleman Center will bring together the people and ideas to make those breakthroughs possible.”
A Building Meant to Put Different Disciplines in the Same Room
The Middleman Center, at 3600 Civic Center Boulevard, sits atop an office tower that began construction in 2018 as an eight-story, roughly 250,000-square-foot building that has remained in active use throughout the project. Its original first seven floors have since been renovated, and a new 217,000-square-foot wet lab, office, and research facility now sits on top. The Center is designed to house the Colton Center for Autoimmunity — a global hub for autoimmunity research and leader of the Colton Consortium for Autoimmunity, which spans centers at Penn, NYU, Yale, Mount Sinai, and Tel Aviv University — the High-Throughput Institute for Discovery, a lab built to run diagnostic and treatment-guiding tests on patient samples, the BSL-3 biosafety Holman Lab for infectious disease research, the Penn Center for Innovation, and the Penn Center for Health Care Transformation and Innovation, all under one roof. University of Pennsylvania President J. Larry Jameson framed the physical layout as the point: “Anchoring the western edge of Penn Medicine’s campus, the Middleman Center is uniquely positioned to bring together biomedical researchers, physicians, medical students, patients, and experts from engineering, business, and other areas of the University of Pennsylvania. This creates an extraordinary environment for discovery, not just sparking ideas but seeing them all the way through to the moments where lives change for the better, as a result of discovery.”
Funding the Early, Uncertain Stage of Research
The Middleman Fund is intended to support cancer, autoimmune disease, infectious disease, and other research at its earliest and most pivotal stages, an approach Penn says is modeled on the funding strategy that helped enable its CAR T cell therapy and mRNA research breakthroughs.
Kevin B. Mahoney, CEO of the University of Pennsylvania Health System, described the gift as underwriting the patience science requires: “In today’s world of science and medicine, progress comes when researchers have the support to ask important questions and the time and resources to follow them wherever they lead. This gift will help sustain that progress at the cutting edge of medicine, build on emerging findings, and create new paths for exploration across a broad range of diseases and disciplines.”
Perelman School of Medicine Dean Jonathan A. Epstein connected the fund to Penn’s track record: “Investing in our most promising research has long been Penn Medicine’s blueprint for bringing breakthrough science to patients around the world. The Middleman Fund will allow Penn Medicine to identify and support today’s ideas that can become the lifesaving treatments of tomorrow.”
About Penn Medicine
Penn Medicine is one of the world’s leading academic medical centers, encompassing the University of Pennsylvania Health System and the Raymond and Ruth Perelman School of Medicine — founded in 1765 as the nation’s first medical school. The organization is home to nearly 49,000 faculty and staff and has been behind major medical breakthroughs, including CAR T cell therapy for cancer and the Nobel Prize–winning mRNA technology used in COVID-19 vaccines.
