Bay Area’s First Medical School in Over 100 Years Could Open in 2030

Julie Sullivan, president of the university, said she’s joyful about the potential of the medical school.

“It has potential to really have an impact on the quality of healthcare for the future of our country and on the really innovative and humanistic training of future physicians,” Sullivan said in an interview.

The school will be named in recognition of Mark and Mary Stevens, who donated $175 million to support it, which is the “largest-ever cash gift to Catholic higher education, and the largest gift ever to either Santa Clara or Sutter Health,” the university said in a statement.

Mark Stevens is a venture capitalist who runs S-Cubed Capital and was previously a managing partner at legendary Menlo Park venture firm Sequoia Capital. He sits on the board of technology giant Nvidia, which is based in Santa Clara and makes specialized computer chips powering a significant portion of the AI industry. Mary Stevens is a member of the board of trustees of the university and a 1984 graduate.

The new medical school’s future 82,000-square-foot facility is currently under construction in the northern portion of the city, next to the Sutter East Santa Clara Campus at 2441 Mission College Blvd., where the system already operates a surgical care center, as well as an urgent care and outpatient clinic.

The location is about a five-minute drive from the Sutter West Santa Clara Campus, where the Sacramento-based system is planning to open a new 272-bed, eight-story hospital and medical center by 2031. That cluster is about four miles north of the university’s main campus.

Dr. Lindsay Mazotti, the chief medical officer of medical education and science at Sutter Health and planning dean of the new school of medicine, anticipates the school starting with about 60 students graduating in its first class and hopes to ramp up quickly to graduate roughly 120 physicians a year.

“In addition, Sutter Health is going from about 200 residency and fellowship slots annually…to nearly a thousand slots,” Mazotti said. “So year over year and generationally, this is a significant number for Northern California.”

Stanford School of Medicine graduated 76 doctors in its 2024 class, while UCSF School of Medicine graduated 173, according to a 2025 UCSF report. Across California, 16 medical schools graduated a total of 1,833 doctors in 2024, of which 1,433 received Doctor of Medicine degrees, known as MDs, and 400 received a Doctor of Osteopathic Medicine degrees, known as DOs.

The American Association of Medical Colleges estimated that the U.S. will face a shortage of up to 86,000 physicians by 2036.

Mazotti said the shortage is not just of general physicians, but also those who specialize in areas such as cardiology, pulmonary, endocrinology and gastroenterology, as well as surgeons.

“Across California, we anticipate that access to care, that ability to be seen in a timely way, will worsen over time. And so we’re stepping forward to meet that challenge and to try to create more doctors for our patients in our communities,” she said.

The medical school also represents another expansion for the university, which just earlier this year announced the Cunningham Shoquist Center for Applied AI and Human Potential, which was funded by an estimated $25 million gift from Debora Shoquist, a 1976 graduate of the university and the executive vice president of operations at Nvidia.

Sullivan, the university president, said the decision to found a medical school with Sutter, which serves more than 3.5 million patients in California, was driven by Santa Clara University’s 2024 strategic plan, called Impact: 2030, in which one of four pillars is “solutions for the universal good.”

“How is our community, through its education, its scholarship, really making this a better world for all?” Sullivan said, noting that over 10% of the university’s undergraduate students are interested in graduate healthcare programs.

“And healthcare is about 20% of our country’s GDP, and it’s one of the fastest-growing sectors. I don’t see that changing with our aging population. And so it just seemed like such an opportunity for Santa Clara to really build on the programs that we have,” she said.

She also envisioned medical students pursuing MDs being able to take advantage of the university’s overlapping disciplines by integrating multiple degree programs, such as a potential “specialized MBA” that would include study of “the business of healthcare and the systems of healthcare.”

The school is currently expected to open around 2030, but a firm opening date will depend largely on when the school becomes accredited, officials said.

The university said the school of medicine will be “leading-edge” and will integrate AI innovations and encourage collaboration with the university’s new AI center.

Mazotti said AI has dramatically shifted much of how care is delivered, and the school will aim to “create not only technologically fluent learners for today, but actually adaptable learners” who will use changing tools in the future.

She also said the school’s approach to learning will look very different from a traditional medical school setting, including augmented reality and the potential use of AI coaches who can help students study and review skills.

“And so the opportunity for us, especially in our unique location of Silicon Valley, to position our students to be able to navigate that rapidly advancing technology, that’s going to be really important,” Mazotti said. “It’s exciting to try to design the school of the future, not the school for today.”