Chancellor Juan Sánchez Muñoz at the historic UC Merced Medical Education Building groundbreaking May 14.
UC Merced: construction of new medical education
building to support SJV PRIME+ and ‘B.S. to M.D. pathway’
BY JIM CHIAVELLI,
Associate Vice Chancellor, External Relations – UC Merced
(EDITOR’S NOTE: a version of the following article first published in the UC Merced Magazine, May 13. This revised version reflects updated information).
The UC Merced medical education program – striving to help breach the shortage of physicians and other health care professionals in the Central Valley – took a major step forward earlier this month with a groundbreaking ceremony for the new Medical Education Building that is slated for completion in fall 2026.
Located behind the Arts and Computational Sciences Building at the southeast end of the campus, the 150,000-square-foot structure will serve as home for the university’s San Joaquin Valley PRIME Plus Program (SJV PRIME+), an academic partnership with the University of California San Francisco and its Fresno campus.
On three floors of classrooms, labs and offices, the new facility will also incorporate UC Merced’s legacy Public Health and Psychological Sciences faculty and students as well as the Health Sciences Research Institute. The building’s atrium will be dedicated to Fresno developer Ed Kashian and his wife Jeanne, who made a $5 million gift to support SJV PRIME+.
“Medical education had long been part of the plan for UC Merced since before we opened our doors to undergraduates in 2005,” Chancellor Juan Sánchez Muñoz said at the May 14 groundbreaking. “It was very much a dream, but one far too long deferred until now.”
The urgency for medical education was driven by the critical lack of health care professionals in the Central Valley, a problem that has only grown since.
“We know from the research literature that medical professionals are far more likely to establish practices in the places where they were educated and undertook their residencies,” said Muñoz, who is a CVHEC board member. “That is why our new medical education program — known as SJV PRIME PLUS — in partnership with UCSF and USCF-Fresno, is so important to the people and communities of the Central Valley.”
Staying close and connected to the communities they hope to serve
Familiarly known as the “B.S. to M.D. pathway,” SJV PRIME+ offers a cohort of Central Valley students preferred admission to medical school, assuming they hit all their academic marks.
Dr. Margo Vener, director of medical education, noted that the second cohort of 15 students has been admitted for fall 2024, following the inaugural cohort that just completed the first year of classes.
For four years, students take an intensive undergraduate pre-med course and earn their baccalaureate of science (B.S.) degree at UC Merced. After graduation, students stay at UC Merced to complete their first 1 ½ years of medical school. For their clinical years, medical students transition to UCSF Fresno for their final 2 ½ years at the Fresno campus.
Because UC Merced and UCSF Fresno are regional medical campuses of UCSF, when students graduate, they will receive their M.D.s from UCSF but will have earned their entire B.S. and M.D. degrees in the Valley, staying close and connected to the communities they hope to serve.
The B.S. program is established, and UCSF has been offering medical education since 1864. What UC Merced is developing is that “middle” — the year and a half of doctor training that will be conducted in the campus’s new Medical Education Building.
Hiring faculty to deliver the rigorous education required
Vener explained that in the UCSF medical curriculum known as “Foundations 1,” first- and second-year medical students attend classes, study in labs such as anatomy and microbiology, engage with scientific questions, and gain core doctoring skills through patient simulation while at UC Merced.
In “Foundations 2” and “Career Launch,” third- and fourth-year students will do clinical rotations and engage in direct patient care through the Fresno campus. UC Merced is on track to deliver Foundations 1 by fall 2027. To do so, Vener is overseeing the hiring of faculty who can deliver the rigorous education required.
“These will be teaching faculty in foundational science, such as biochemistry, anatomy, physiology, pharmacology, microbiology, immunology, population health and more,” she said. “We are in the middle of that hiring process, hoping to send out offers to start July 1.”
The first group of medical education faculty — Vener expects to hire about five — will arrive with a “tripartite job” —learning the UCSF education system, along with some teaching at that campus; holding classes at UC Merced; and “of course, scholarly academic work.”
In keeping with the community orientation of the B.S. to M.D. pathway, the first faculty member hired, Rosa Manzo, Ph.D., specializes in community engagement.
A native of Fresno County, Dr. Manzo is quite familiar with UC Merced and the region as a six-year project scientist in the Health Sciences Research Institute at Merced, which she joined after working as an administrator, instructor and researcher at UC Davis.
Dr. Manzo said her work will focus on building community engagement research opportunities with federally qualified health centers and local partners, along with curriculum, for the future doctors. She will build on networks she has established throughout her work at UC Merced, in part aided by grants from Genentech, Inc.
“Making those connections from the classroom to the community” will help ensure the students become “more culturally competent physicians,” she said.
New medical education faculty will be creating a unique path in establishing medical education at UC Merced.
While learning the UCSF Foundations 1 curriculum, students will be based at UC Merced; this will allow them to build a community of medical educators in the Valley.
“We will be embedding them at UC Merced so that they truly understand the strengths, challenges, and needs of the Valley and of our students,” Vener said. That grounding should help them add some “SJV gems to the UCSF curriculum.”
That’s the first faculty recruitment phase of her own tripartite job. She hopes to bring on a second cohort of educators in 2025 — “any additional teaching faculty we need, but the majority will be clinicians” — and then “phase three is looking for ad-hoc instructors” who can instruct in specific medical fields.
UC Merced’s Academic Senate has begun the process of considering a new Department of Medical Education in the School of Natural Sciences — an academic home for these new teachers.
In Foundations 1, she said, students will be taking classes four days per week at UC Merced and the fifth day will be entirely clinical to learn key doctoring skills. Each Thursday, students will be paired with a physician-coach in Fresno and join “very small groups” of fellow students “talking to patients, working as part of a clinical team to address clinical problems” one day a week.
“The coaching program is a hallmark of UCSF,” said Vener, who taught at the campus for 20 years before joining UC Merced. The established clinicians work with students “on their professional identity and growth” as well as medical education and stay with them until they graduate with their M.D.s
Those students will soon have a physical presence on campus in the new Medical Education Building.
Meanwhile, the first cohort of B.S. to M.D. students — all recruited from the Central Valley —is off to a solid start.
“They are doing great, and they’re super enthusiastic,” said Vener. “Remember — we feel confident that every student we take into this program has the capability to do the work and become a great doctor. Students joined this program because they are dedicated to becoming doctors for the Valley. Our job is to give them the training they need to make their dreams into reality so they can become the skillful, humane physicians that the Valley deserves.”
See:
• UC Merced Medical Education Building Groundbreak press release
• UC Merced breaks ground on new $300M medical education building. (Merced Focus – May 14, 2024)
• UC Merced set to build $300 million medical education building (Merced SunStar – May 15, 2024)
• Groundbreaking held for UC Merced’s new Medical Education Building – (ABC 30 – May 14, 2024)
