trustees approved the termination of the academic affiliation between Mount Sinai and NYU. In 2010, Mount Sinai was accredited by the Middle States Commission on Higher Education and became an independent degree-granting institution. On November 14, 2012, it was announced that Mount Sinai School of Medicine would be renamed Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, following a US$200 million gift from New York businessman and philanthropist Carl Icahn. In 2015, Mount Sinai announced partnerships with The Children's Hospital of Philadelphia as well as National Jewish Health, the nation's leading institutes for pediatric and pulmonary care respectively, leading to the creation of the Mount Sinai Children’s Heart Center and the Mount Sinai – National Jewish Health Respiratory Institute. In March 2020, Elmhurst Hospital Center, the public hospital that serves as a major training site for Mount Sinai students and residents, was the epicenter of New York City's initial COVID-19 surge, with Mount Sinai house staff and faculty serving as the city's first frontline workers treating patients infected with coronavirus. Mount Sinai has since established itself at the forefront of research to understand and treat COVID-19, being named a lead site in a $470 million study to examine the long-term effects of COVID-19. 2019 lawsuit In April 2019, the Icahn School was named in a lawsuit filed against Mount Sinai Health System and several employees of the Icahn School's Arnhold Institute for Global Health. The suit was filed by eight current and former employees for "age and sex discrimination as well as improper reporting to funding agencies, misallocation of funds, failing to obtain Institutional Review Board approval prior to conducting research in violation of Mount Sinai and federal guidelines, and failing properly to adhere to the guidelines of the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act or HIPAA." The school denies the claims. More than 150 students at the Icahn School and more than 400 Icahn and Mount Sinai Health System faculty have signed letters, addressed to the Board of Trustees, calling on the system to investigate these allegations. Academics Mount Sinai's medical curriculum is based on the standard program of medical education in the United States: the first two years of study are confined to the medical sciences, the latter to the study of clinical sciences. The first and second years are strictly pass/fail; the third and fourth years feature clinical rotations at Mount Sinai Hospital (Manhattan) and Elmhurst Hospital Center,