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Santa Clara University President Julie Sullivan addressed faculty, staff, and students at the University's 2026-27 academic year Convocation on Sept. 15, 2026, followed by a discussion by Santa Clara University Provost and EVP James Glaser and Sutter Health Chief Education Officer Lindsay Mazotti.

Convocation Remarks

Julie Sullivan

Thank you and welcome, welcome, welcome all to our new academic year. I welcome you all with gratitude. Gratitude for your commitment to our Jesuit mission, gratitude for your many, many talents, and gratitude for the caring community that you have created here at this university. As we gather this afternoon, I also want to note that today is the first day of Hispanic Heritage Month. How about that? And I'm pleased to announce that this year we will host our Camino de los Muertos celebration on November 1st, Sunday, November 1st, beginning with a 5:00 mass. This has become a treasured event on for our community, which attracts more and more families from this community and across this region and also future Broncos. So I hope that you will join us this this year.

I also as Jim mentioned want to pay special welcome to our new members of our community and I'd like to welcome and personally introduce two new members of our leadership team who started just this month. First, Dean Ravi Bapna of the Leavey School of Business. Would you please stand? All right. Thank you. and Amy Yancey, vice president of university relations. Please stand. I hope all of you will take the opportunity to get to know Ravi and Amy. between them. They bring amazing experience to us, outstanding experience and track records, a depth of higher education knowledge, and a shared commitment to our Jesuit mission. So, thank you. As I go along and I speak about certain people, if they've joined us in the last year, I'll ask them to stand.

If they haven't, I won't. So, that that's the metric. I don't want you to get confused. All right. So, let's talk about who our new students are who have joined us this academic year. Well, we are expecting about 1,600 new undergraduate students, first-time first-year students. This is a group of students coming out of the Mission Church during the summer orientations that we held this summer. 18% are first generation, nearly 15% are Pell eligible, 58% hail from California, and 6% are international students. Really delighted with this. So to meet our Impact 2030 goal of providing opportunity for all talented students, we continue to pursue the goal of meeting 100% of demonstrated financial need for every student that metriculates at Santa Clara.

In the past, that's the goal. Let me tell you about a little progress. In the past four years, our discount rate has grown from 29% to 35%. And this has primarily been from reallocating internal investments. We currently meet approximately 81% of the need of our students. We want to meet 100% of the need of our students. And to do this, we will have to grow our discount rate to at least 40%. And we're going to have to do this primarily through scholarships. So, this speaks to the importance of our next capital campaign and having someone like Amy with her multi-billion dollar campaign experience to help us plan and lead it. Many students incorrectly assume that Santa Clara is out of their reach and they don't even consider us.

It is so important for us to clearly signal to prospective students early in their search process that if admitted Santa Clara will be a possibility for them. Thus, two years ago, we launched the Cristo Rey and California promise programs to make that signal. I'm particularly pleased to share that we learned just today that Santa Clara University is enrolling the largest cohort of Cristo Rey graduates among all universities in the country this year. And we are making progress in making the university more accessible to Californians as well. We enrolled 220 California Promise students this fall. We chose the California Promise name carefully because this was only the start. Today, I'm very pleased to announce an expansion of our California Promise program.

Our simpler and expanded commitment for first-year students next fall is to meet full demonstrated need. That's tuition plus room and board of all first-time first-year California students whose family income is $150,000 or below. And we are thrilled. This makes the promise simple and our students and families are able to understand whether this is going to apply to them. We also are making progress on our Impact 2030 goal of increasing transfer students. This fall, we expect to exceed our target of 270 incoming transfer students, about 26% of whom are Pell eligible. And by winter, we likely will exceed or excuse me, we likely will be halfway to our Impact 2030 annual goal of 400 transfer students a year.

We were trying to increase from 200 to 400, and we think we'll have 300 this year. So, we're making amazing progress, but we aim to accelerate this progress even more. So, for the first time this fall, we will extend the California Promise to transfer students by committing to provide a scholarship covering at least half of tuition for those with family incomes of $150,000 and below. And this is quite an expansion of our transfer financial aid program. I am so proud of our enrollment, our finance teams, our other teams who have made these initiatives possible. So, please thank all the people that have put a lot of hard work into doing this for our students. And as Jim said, our School of Law and Jesuit School of Theology are in session.

And the work of both similarly exhibits the innovative, can-do spirit of this university. Our first year law students. These this is during their convocation where the students were taking their oath of professionalism. This is the students pledge to uphold values of integrity, service and justice. This year, the School of Law was able to leverage a national surge in law school applications to increase their enrollment numbers and selectivity. I'm pleased to share that we exceeded our enrollment target and welcomed 285 new JD students with a median LSAT score of 161, which is the highest in our history. Very pleased with that.

And 22% of our new JD students are first generation and 100% of our students earned a PLEDGEe scholarship which ensured that any debt they needed to incur would be within the new limits on federally federally guaranteed loans. So let's talk about JST. Our Jesuit School of Theology welcomed 54 incoming students, the largest incoming class in five years. The cohort includes 18 Jesuits and 10 religious women and represents 15 countries and four continents. And this is a photo of some of the new students visiting the Mission campus. I also want to thank the group of faculty, staff, and students from JST-SCU who traveled from Berkeley to be with us today. And I'm so excited that you won't have to make that trip next year. Welcome. Welcome.

We are still determining our final numbers for our other graduate programs which are on the quarter system. Overall however, we expect that our total enrollment for the University will be close to budget and will not require any university-wide measures. So, that's a good thing. All right, let's anticipate this new academic year. Let's look ahead. I can feel the joy already. As we look ahead and there will be many opportunities, there will be some challenges. We are committed to living our Jesuit mission in ever more meaningful and impactful ways. This year marks the 175th year of our life as a University. And our purpose of providing a Jesuit humanistic education continues to thrive. And that's not just me saying this.

I'm delighted to announce that last month I received a letter from Father General Arturo Sosa, the leader of the worldwide Jesuit Society, in which he confidently reaffirmed the Catholic and Jesuit mission of Santa Clara University. This letter represented the culmination of our Mission Priority Examen which many of you participated in and it positions us to respond ever more creatively to Father General's call in this letter that we “satisfy the yearning for meaning and hope among many in our community and in our world.” And that's just what we intend to do. And it is in this spirit that we must live our Jesuit mission in ever new ways to create those leaders of competence, conscience, and compassion for this changing world that we are in today.

So a theme of this upcoming year is Jesuit Humanistic Education in the age of AI. Our society previously adopted and adapted to many significant new technologies and that's a picture of Santa Clara in the Silicon Valley by the way. Many of which were invented right here in our backyard. So why is the advancement offered by AI so dramatically different? Why do we need to examine whether we are providing the most powerful Jesuit humanistic education at this moment? Well, why is Pope Leo's first encyclical Magnifica Humanitas subtitled On Safeguarding the Human Person in the Time of AI?

Why is there so much alarm from some, optimism from others, and uncertainty from all about the future impact of agentic AI, physical AI such as robots and self-driving cars and most recently about artificial general intelligence, which if you've turned the TV on the last four days, you've heard a lot about it, which can– or read a newspaper, even online–which can apply knowledge. Artificial and general intelligence can apply knowledge across domains and and task beyond those specified by humans. So yes, we're in an age of rapidly rapidly changing technology. There's a call to slow down the pace. Hopefully that will happen. But nevertheless, it's already grown dramatically. and people feel differently about it.

Yet, Pope Leo points out that technology is not a force antagonistic to humanity, nor is it inherently evil. Rather, it takes on the characteristics of those who use, create, finance, and regulate it. So as a Jesuit university in the heart of the world's innovation ecosystem, the question for us is not whether we are for or against AI. It is about how we will discern its proper use and applications and how our education will place our precious, infinitely valuable human dignity at the center of our decisions. It is how we and our students will take leadership roles in creating solutions in this society-altering moment that center humanity, mitigate AI's potential harms and maximize its potential benefits.

Such solutions are rooted in our Jesuit, Catholic values because they promote the essence of our humanity, the dignity of every human person, the value of work, the importance of truth, social justice, and peace. And they benefit all, not just a wealthy few. Such solutions also will require a panoply of voices including from leaders in higher education, government, business, health care and faith organizations. I'm very very grateful for the wise and impactful thought leadership so many SCU faculty are providing to these vital and ongoing conversations about the future of AI on humanity. I will call out Professor Leocadie Lushombo sitting there in between those two cardinals.

She can't be here today because she's teaching all day, but she was present with Pope Leo when he presented his encyclical and she was asked to provide commentary. I also call out and I see him Markkula Center Professor Brian Green. Wave your hand Brian, who worked extensively with the Vatican on this project. There are too many others of you to name individually. Professors from theology, ethics, philosophy, law, religious studies, and engineering. And I am so pleased that Santa Clara faculty are playing such an active role and expect your insightful contributions to continue. So now I would like to turn to the impact of this rapidly changing AI world on our Jesuit humanistic education.

Does the value of our education change in this context and do we approach it differently? Well, I mentioned this summer's orientations. We we welcome thousands of people to this campus, new students and their families, and I often heard from parents how delighted and grateful they were that their students had chosen to attend Santa Clara at this moment in time. They commented on the relevance of our Jesuit values, of being people for and with others, of the development of our whole person education and development of our students and the personalized and uniformly caring nature of the students, faculty and staff whom they encountered here. And then a father asked me if I thought Santa Clara would still be in existence in 10 years.

“Now that AI knows everything, what is there left for you to teach?" Really? He asked me that seriously. Of course, I said that our Jesuit humanistic education is only more important today in the context of AI. I stressed our excellence in developing skills and dispositions that technology can never replace like critical thinking and analysis, curiosity and imagination, ethical decision making, spirituality, empathy, emotional intelligence, and human connection. I went on and on. I also stressed the importance of developing the human agency to continue to learn. Many uses of AI deprive students of the opportunity to stretch their intellectual muscles and learn how to learn.

We need to help students understand that the process of learning is necessarily a productive struggle and that the most important product of that learning is not a grade but cultivating their better selves and leading a more meaningful life. one with personal growth and intellectual maturity and the development of their own imagination, insight, and judgment. The notion of this productive struggle was recently highlighted in a Santa Clara University story about our own Professor Cruz Medina, a professor of rhetoric and composition, about how he empowers students to find their distinct voice and avoid learning losses that come with cognitive offloading to AI agents like ChatGPT, and Claude.

He stresses that critical thinking is at the heart of our writing and that real learning happens during moments of struggle. Our core curriculum revision is also going to be quite active this year and it is so important and so timely as we strengthen and adapt our Jesuit humanistic education and note the increasing importance of this technology context we sit in today. I'm so delighted with the core curriculum review committee's recent outstanding proposal and extend my generous gratitude to the committee members Naomi Andrews, Laura Doyle, Fiona Ji, Poncho Jimenez, Craig Stevens, Chan Thai, and Korin Wheeler. Three key aspects of the core curriculum are creating community through two shared first-year experiences.

One is a new first-year seminar focused on critical thinking, writing, and navigating complex conversations. Another is a new Jesuit engagement and community program which takes students off campus to work with underserved communities and includes a reflection component. All students will complete these two experiences together regardless of their major or school, which is so important. as our graduates will do much of their future work in multi-disciplinary teams. A second key aspect is connecting values directly to every field of study.

In new values and context courses, students will grapple now within their own fields of study with the application of Jesuit principles to four pressing issues: sustainability, social justice, civic engagement, and responsible use of science and technology. For me, the latter is so important as I believe for students to hit the ground running, they need to learn about the advantages and pitfalls of the specific types of technologies that are emerging in their chosen fields. A third key aspect of the core curriculum is learning by doing, high impact practices. Several high-impact practices for all students are integrated into the core including study abroad, research collaborations with faculty, internships, and community engagement.

The evidence has long been clear that these hands-on learning experiences promote student engagement, academic success, and prepare students to thrive in their future work settings. The Center for Spirituality and Faith. Our Jesuit humanistic tradition foregrounds our deepest existential questions. And we're finding that today's students are increasingly coming to Santa Clara seeking meaning and purpose and community and practices that can sustain them for a lifetime. In response to this hunger, Father Matt Carnes and his mission and ministry colleagues have creatively reimagined what was formerly known as Campus Ministry as a new Center for Spirituality and Faith which opened this summer. The new director of the center is Dr. Kathleen Quiazon.

The new –wait just a minute. I'm gonna ask him to stand– The new director of Catholic Life, you've already seen, but I'll ask him to stand. Andrew Laguna and Father Bob Glynn, S.J., started just today as a chaplain for graduate students. So, if the three of you would stand, please. The center also will be adding a sp a director of spiritual diversity and I'm pleased to say this year they will be developing positions for JST students who will be here next year to serve as fellow interns in the center. The mission of the center is to meet every student where they are in their spiritual and faith journey and to help them find their meaning, purpose and sense of belonging.

It welcomes everyone and it cherishes and celebrates the full humanity and flourishing of all students through liturgies, retreats, interfaith programming, and spiritual getaways. The Cunningham Shoquist Center for Applied AI and Human Potential. We will open the center in January 2027 in Heafey Hall. That's why you see this picture— the center will be right inside that door which faces out towards the fountain. The center will help our faculty and students be the responsible creators and users of AI applications that enhance human potential and all disciplines across campus. It will support AI projects and research, create experiential learning opportunities for students, and help faculty and students connect with industry.

I'm pleased to say that Professor Yi Fang has been named the faculty director of the center, and we will be searching for the executive director this fall, and I look forward to the many opportunities it will provide us. Here's another picture that's obviously a mockup, but we've had some—And this is where you're coming in that door that you just saw and just how it's going to be a high energy futuristic looking and very filled with actual people. So, and lastly, I want to talk about the Center for Engaged Teaching and Learning or CETL as I may refer to it. The CETL was launched last year as part of our Impact 2030 goal of strengthening the teacher scholar model. Dr. Riley Caldwell O'Keefe joined us this past December as the inaugural director. Riley.

Riley, where are you? There she is. There they are. Thank you. And is working alongside Professor Amy Lueck, associate provost, faculty development, and numerous others to support Jesuit humanistic teaching and learning in the context of AI. Let me tell you that teaching in the context of AI effectively is a huge lift. and our faculty are undertaking it. They are re-examining learning goals across their courses, discerning what students should be able to do with AI and without AI and how to best assess both. I am so grateful for our incredible faculty. They are bright, curious, and flexible and extremely dedicated to their teaching, research, and our students. This year, the CETL will be engaged in extensive work to create and expand AI resources and faculty support.

And you won't have time to read this, but you'll get it again. They're going to be sharing an AI and teaching and learning statement. As you can see, it gives each professor their prerogative to do what's going to be best to meet the learning goals in their course. It was developed by the Provost’s Office in consultation with a number of faculty, staff, and students. the center. The CETL will also be launching a faculty website providing accesses to curated resources, expanding faculty development partnerships and expanding faculty development workshops in partnership with IS instructional design and technology and manager Eric Haynie on topics such as course design and assessment, prompting and evaluating AI output and creating custom AI tools to support individual student learning.

Also they will be creating dialogical spaces particularly within our schools and disciplines as well as across the university for our faculty to collaborate with each other and with students and finally establishing a faculty staff and student advisory board. And let me also say we have a lot going on with respect to AI this year. So in coordination with the Cunningham Shoquist Center and the CETL, our AI working group which was established last year will continue leading Santa Clara's strategic operational and administrative implementation of particular AI tools by responsibly assessing these tools, ensuring they're we have the training on them and developing the necessary institutional infrastructure and accountability such as policy, governance, trusted data, security and privacy.

Of course, one of our largest projects reflecting our Jesuit there we that was where I wanted to be reflecting our Jesuit humanistic education in the context of AI is creating the Stevens School of Medicine. That work we will be doing this year, continuing doing in partnership with Setter Health. We currently are in the throes of creating a medical school to harness technology innovation while ensuring that ethics and compassion remain at the center of care and technology serves people and never substitutes for human discernment.

To tell you about all of this, I'd like to ask Provost Jim Glaser to return to the stage accompanied by Lindsay Mazotti who is the planning dean for the Stevens School of Medicine, chief academic officer at Sutter Health and a practicing physician. And if there's time, we'll take a few questions at the end, but please join me in welcoming Jim and Lindsay. 

Jim Glaser and Lindsay Mazotti

Well, Lindsay, welcome to Santa Clara. Thank you. Hi, everyone. Thank you for having me. Actually, you do have some Santa Clara blood in you, I think. I do. Yeah. My parents met here during a pickup softball game in which my mom hit a home run and my dad asked her out on the spot. So yeah, and I was a flower girl a couple times in the church in the mission. So yes, I love it here. Thanks for having me.

You did say your mother learned of your appearance here earlier today. She did. She's I think she'll be very excited when we send her the video. I think she's going to want to see it. So yes, she was very excited. Excellent. Good. Well, this whole project, as Julie mentioned, is really about the coming together of a health care system, a first class health care system, an ambitious one with a very large network of physician groups and hospitals and ambulatory care units and a Jesuit university that's as one of my colleagues said is a blastoff university. we're blasting off. And it's that combination. It's that power of two that is going to make this medical school really powerful.

We're really also trying to bring together the fact that we are located in Silicon Valley in the heart of technology together with our Jesuit values, our Jesuit principles and and bringing those two things together to inform the education that we provide for our medical students we think is going to offer a very very distinctive place in the marketplace of of medical schools. You know, Lindsay and I back at the very beginning of this process, which was a long and winding road, I will tell you that, because we had to bring together our two institutions.

While there was a lot of goodwill and a lot of intent to bring it together, we had a lot of things to work out with regard to the finances, with regard to the legal provisions, and so early on in this process, you and I went out to Home Eat. Everybody knows the Home Eat over in the north side of the campus. Really good, really good food. And this was the –it was really good. This was the the fortune cookie which was don't shy away from doing hard things. And this is has been a challenging thing and it will continue to be, because we are still several years away from opening our doors. People ask when will this start and the answer is it starts when the accredititors tell us that we can start. But we think it will be 2030.

But this process is going to be arduous. it involves making a lot of foundational decisions which we'll be talking about um and raising a lot of money to really set it up to be successful. So, we are not shying away from doing hard things. And this was a prophetic fortune cookie to get. And and just to to give you some sense of how we've been working together, this is a photograph from earlier this summer. We brought our leadership teams together for a full day of retreat to really start working through the vision, the mission statement, the vision statement, and the values that will undergird this project. Lindsay is going to talk about those in just a few minutes. So, I'm really excited. You make it sound like it's it's been a long journey.

There's a lot of work ahead of us. We are really really excited. This is a sort of a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to reimagine what medical education can be like. And we've been incredibly blessed by a very large $175 million gift from Mark and Mary Stevens. And they think of this as sort of a love letter to their physicians and just an incredible amount of responsibility that comes with with that love letter. So we're taking that very seriously. Just some logistics as we think about sort of what the school looks like and how the school comes together with the university. So the school operates as a separate 501(c)3. It is a subsidiary of Santa Clara University and Santa Clara University is the degree-granting institution.

So there's a a very strong partnership with Sutter and a very large lengthy legal collaborative agreement. But at the end of the day, we're really excited that the medical students will be Santa Clara students and that they have access to all of the incredible Things here at the university and and within the alumni network and you know all of the world that exists in the Silicon Valley and beyond of Santa Clara University.

I want to talk a little bit about the mission and vision and just kind of share that with you because as you can imagine as you're sort of thinking about modern medicine and a Jesuit institution, there is an incredible overlap that comes around taking care of people, seeing people for their humanity, their spiritual, physical, mental well-being\, contributing to service to communities, especially underserved communities. And so it's been a really interesting journey as we've been, as I've been learning more about about the Jesuit pedagogy and the values that are part so deeply ingrained and you heard them from President Sullivan earlier.

So such a part of your institution that they resonate very closely actually with the ideals of medicine and so as a personally as a physician, you capture so many things that we think about all the time and that we hold to be sort of our truest ideals. And it actually was relatively easy to write the mission which is to prepare physicians to lead healthcare transformations grounded in humanity, shaped by innovation and deeply committed to serving individuals, families and communities. And that's real. We talk about serving our patients first and our people always at Sutter Health and we talk about the communities we serve all the time.

And so this is right on and our vision just to think about, to shape a future where medicine anticipates illness, promotes healing, deepens trust. We're thinking about this from not only sort of prevention and and cure, but also from how do you hold people during the time that they need medicine the most, which is generally at their sickest and most vulnerable.So we're really proud of of what we're building and I'll just share with you some of the values that will come up. You'll see some resonance here with your university and you should. So, human flourishing, humility and courage, ethical discernment, I'm sorry, discernment and ethical judgment, learning and innovation, collaboration and stewardship, and then service to that common good.

So these are the pillars by which we make sure that everything that we're putting into the school is encapsulating these values and making sure that we're building good on returning physicians to the workforce who are grown and and created in an environment where this is at the center of their education. It's in education broadly in medical school, but to name it and to be designing a curriculum to it from scratch, that's like a real opportunity because we don't have to change anyone's mind and we don't have to change anyone's budgets and so we can kind of think about doing it from the start, which is pretty exciting. Let's talk a little bit about what you're all thinking. Where is this going to go?

It is not going to go on this campus.So there will not be any disruptive construction. Uh but it will be close to here. It will be about five miles from here. Relatively close to Levi Stadium and the Great America theme park. In fact, from the medical school, you can look out and see the roller coaster. You can hear the roller coaster. You can hear the roller coaster. Screaming of the roller coaster. Yes. It'll be quiet. I don't know how long uh the theme park is going to be around, but nonetheless, it has been a symbol of our journey, our up-and-down journey that we've taken thus far and that we anticipate happening. But there's other things that are important to note about this location. One of them is is that it will be just steps away from patients.

So the ambulatory care clinic is right across the patio from where the medical school will be located and our students will be able to within two minutes be able to be sitting in front of patients and working with physicians. And then across the road, Sutter Health is building a hospital campus, a a major hospital. It's a relatively short walk to the hospital. We expect our students to be able to move into the hospital with ease to bring back the experiences that they had in the hospital, back into their classrooms, for in fact the hospital to provide us with, through technology with very very current cases that are happening within the hospital at the very time that the students are engaging the particular questions that they're engaging.

One other thing to note about the location, there is a bus stop that's right in front of the facility that will take you right over to Guadalupe Hall, direct line. So our medical students will be able to come to campus for recreation, for coursework, for going to go to church. I mean all kinds of opportunities for them to be here which we're very excited about. The actual building which you saw a photograph of, or a mockup of earlier, is about an 85,000 foot building. 62,000 square feet will be occupied by the medical school, but the rest of the building will have very functional space for both the medical school and for Sutter. Thank you.

So we'll have for instance I think a cafe will be located there so we can nourish our students but it will also be open to the broader Sutter community on the campus. We anticipate starting with 60 students in our opening class. We will build that up to 120 students per class. So at full capacity the school will have about 480 students, roughly half of them will be in clerkships which means they may be located there but are probably going to be located at other Sutter locations where they'll be getting exposure to all the different specialties that are part of medical training. So I have the pleasure of being the planning dean and we are going through the process of hiring a founding dean.

And so that search kicks off right now and we'll hopefully have someone joining us late spring early summer next year to take us through the ongoing accreditation. So it is a very long process. The dean reports up to a board which is shared jointly by Sutter Health and by Santa Clara University and the dean reports to President Sullivan and to the Sutter Health leadership and a dotted line to to Provost Glaser. And there are a number of committees as you can imagine and several of you who I know are here are participating in these committees and are wondering what they got themselves into but it has been very fun.

We have a meeting I think later today even, and that includes all of the business groups, so communications, legal, HR, as well as a very large accreditation arm which includes this arduous self-study task force we have to turn in about a 600-page document in springtime that outlines everything from faculty governance to the school curriculum to the deans authority to financials. We are hard at work on that andhonestly I can say there are a number of people within Sutter Health who know a lot about medical education but there are not a lot of people within Sutter Health who know a lot about academics and running a universityh and all the pieces that come into play with just governance and ongoing day-to-day life of things like well-being and assessment and the registars's office.

So all of these very important components that you know so deeply really brings a wealth of knowledge and a tremendous asset to the partnership. So we're very very grateful to be with such great partners and we'll be hard at work in the months to come and sharing information as we're able to make sure that you get to understand and know what's happening behind the scenes and are weighing in to some of the opportunities in front of us with the medical school. A few words about some of the big curricular decisions that have been made or soon will be made. You know this is not your –what they say– it's not your grandfather's medical school whatever the Oldsmobile commercial used to say. It's not lecture-based for the most part.

That doesn't mean that there isn't didactic learning or education that happens but students generally will consume knowledge on their own or through taped lectures And most of the education will be in small groups. It will be team- based. It will be project- and problem-oriented and really classically flipped classroom. We really want to make sure that our students are going to be prepared to move out into a world where technology is all around. Atificial intelligence will be incorporated into the educational process and we want our faculty to be facile we want our students to be facile in using AI but it's not just AI.

There are other technologies that are very very influential in medicine and we will certainly be using augmented reality, virtual reality, simulation technologies to enable students to get the kind of practice that's involvedin preparing them to be physicians. Interestingly enough, there will not be cadavers at the medical school. We actually went on a trip to Arkansas and Texas. We saw a cadaver-based program and a non-cadaver-based program, and really came away very impressed by the Walton School of Medicine where they introduced their students to what are called plastinets— anatomy through plastinets— which are human bodies that have been previously dissected and then preserved in silicone.

So this actually simplifies a lot of things but then relies upon technology to educate students on anatomy. We are inching our way toward an organ-based curriculum. I'm going to borrow from Lindsay. She says you know there are the “ologies:” physiology, kinesiology, pharmarmacology— all the ologies. There are medical schools that are organized that way, with all the basic sciences lined up in a row. The other way to do this is to look at systems— the skeletal muscular system, the circulatory system, the nervous system— and you proceed your way through the various systems of the body looking at both the healthy system and the pathologies associated with it.

Research has shown that this is a more efficacious way of educating medical students and we're convinced that this is the way to go. And of course, we really want to make sure to take advantage of the fact that we have such a strong ethical component to our education. We want our students to uh be educated to not only use technology but to be able to evaluate it. You know, before this experience, my main qualification for being part of this was watching The Pitt. I love The Pitt. Who likes The Pitt? I do like The Pitt. It's my main touchstone. But there are so many ethical quandries in The Pitt. That's real. It is true. And we want our students to be able to be able to take on those ethical quandries and have the the sort of equipment to do that.

I'll just talk a little bit about clinical experiences. You can imagine this is really important. When I went to medical school, we waited pretty much until the end of our second year to see real patients. And I had a really hard time kind of retrieving what I had learned in the classroom, in the ‘ologies. It was like if I pulled the file out, the file didn't contain the patient or the way the patient presents or the story that you have to sort through. And as you all know, it's kind of a different language in medicine. And you're kind of testing ideas and and trying to discern what is ailing a patient and how you can how you can help and manage that. So seeing patients early is really important to learning.

It's part of how you put down sort of the foundations of what you're seeing and how you link it back to the science. That's really important. So the the students will be seeing patients early. Traditionally in medical school there's a year of required clerkships. This is usually like surgery, medicine, ObGyn, pediatrics and there's several others. Those clerkships are going to take place all within health. So really the center health physicians will be part not only the preceptors but also part of the classroom-based learning and then the students will go out and spend time for an entire year doing their require required core clerkships across Northern California at Sutter Health.

So, not just in Santa Clara, but actually at some of our larger learning hospitals like in Roseville, San Francisco, Oakland, Sacramento. So, really exciting. And those places have robust graduate medical education or residency programs and fellowship programs who they're very excited to have more students running around and I mentioned our clinical faculty. So, you know, this is kind of our doctor's opportunity to shape our colleagues’ future. And so we think a lot about the workforce shortages that are facing the nation, but certainly California, and how we can make sure that we're growing the best doctors to stay in Northern California and actually take care of us and our family members as we're aging.

And there's a lot of interest in in being not only just you know physician educator but mentor for the next generation and a lot of opportunity to …there's some imprinting that goes on in medicine, where you never forget the doctors who taught you. And so that's a really profound way to sort of hand forward what lessons we learned. So we're very excited. I'll just say if you haven't seen the press, there's a lot of press about the school right now. It's been very fun. Jim and I have been able to kind of run around and talk with different organizations, business organizations, medical organizations, the media.

And just recently we had a piece published by the American Medical Association who's been thinking deeply about the workforce shortages facing us and new opportunities in medical education and they're very excited about what we're doing. S we've been really excited to think about how we can fill the need for the future of medical education and we're not shy about talking to people about the opportunity in front of us. So just key milestones. You're like 2030 is pretty far away but I feel like 2030 might be like tomorrow. I have to say someone told me there's like I don't know now probably 14 Sundays till Christmas and I I feel that way a little bit about the about the school.

It's going to be here before we know it and we need to be ready a year in advance so that we can start our admission cycle. As you all know, the admission cycle takes some time. So, we have lots of site visits, lots of work ahead of us. We're very confident that we have a great team in place and really great leadership from our board and it's going to be a great journey. And so, I hope you get a sense first of all that we have.A great partner in Sutter Health and in Lindsay Mazotti. And I hope you'll join me in thanking her for joining us. We're going to answer some questions, but I'd like to ask Julie to come out and join us. And I think there's some microphones that are wandering the stairwells. So if anybody would like to ask a question, we are wide open.

There's one right there. Hello. It's so exciting to hear about the medical school. I'm actually a premed undergraduate myself. So not necessarily for me but for future undergraduate. I was just wondering what could the premed undergraduates of the future of Santa Clara expect— the relationship between the undergraduate university and the medical school to be? I will I will say this. One of the things, it's not worked out yet, but our admissions committee on that big chart is talking about having a separate admissions process for Santa Clara undergraduates, that, you know, I hope it will and there are other places that do this, have a separate process whereby the students actually don't take the MCATs.

They have a qualified admit, they have to continue their way through on their undergraduate experience and complete it very successfully. But we're hoping that this will be a a pipeline from our undergraduate programs into the medical school. And I don't know if Brian McNelis is here. Is Brian here from the chemistry department? He's our prehealth advisor. We expect that having a medical school here is going to be a boon for our undergraduate students, that there's going to be opportunities that it raises. I'm not sure entirely what they're all going to be. And I'll just add to that, you know, I did my undergraduate up the road at Stanford and during my undergraduate years, I was able to do research with professors at the medical school.

I was able to take an anatomy class with real cadavers at the medical school. Some of my professors who taught as guest lectures in my human biology courses were related, were from the medical school and it meant there were actually some more physicians kind of around the undergraduate campus. I think there all those opportunities are possible. That's I think going to be really important part of what we're building. So great question. First off congratulations. It's so exciting. I'm amazed it's such a heavy lift. There's a probably a reason why of the 27 Jesuit schools only three have medical schools. But congratulations. Couple questions. One, do you see any role for faculty and staff here on our campus in this endeavor?

Do you see any role for allied health professionals, nursing, pharmacy, psychology and so forth? And do you see any role for residency and fellowship training as part of this as well beyond the MD? I will talk about a piece of that and then let Lindsay and Jim take the rest. Clearly starting a medical school is a big lift. We had a committee that looked at expansion into health care during my first year here. They recommended that we look at a number of things including a school of medicine. Once we decided we had this opportunity to do the partnership with Sutter Health, we did this, but we do hope that there'll be other graduate healthcare-related programs in the future.

I've been told I can't talk about them yet because there's just still so much work to do on this one, but there are some possibilities. And I think a medical education right now is very very focused on interprofessional care and team- based care. And so when I think about building out our simulation program or team-based learning where you're you're running medical students through the paces of anything from like a code to a difficult conversation. There we actually have to make sure that we're building interprofessional opportunities within the school. So whether that's with peer learners or with nurses from the hospital or physical therapists – all of those things I think are possible.

And then in terms of faculty involvement I can just say I think there are so many different ways that that faculty or that teaching opportunities will come up within the school and we're definitely working those things out. The core faculty is probably relatively small, mostly sort of biomedical scientists who will be teaching in these integrated courses within the school. And then a number of faculty, you know, physicians coming in. But I certainly think we're really thinking about how how to pull through. We've talked about things like health system science, public health, ethics, all of these opportunities. Obviously, they're really critical that our physicians are learning across from a cross-disciplinary standpoint. So, we hope so.

And I'm hoping I know that there's some folks from the Markkula Center here. I'm hoping that the Markkula Center will very much inform how we think about what we're doing at the medical school. I think there are other staff here certainly in mission and ministry that could be involved. I think there's all kinds of ways to be involved and we hope you will open your imagination to it. Yeah, absolutely. Take one more question and then we'll move to our reception here. Thank you. In addition to the Jesuit values in a in your plan, there's a long history of religious women's orders in the United States founding and forming hospitals and hospital systems. I wonder if you are leveraging the wisdom of those longstanding communities. I'd like to hear about that if you have.

Thank you. Well, we're not founding a hospital, thank goodness. Sutter Health knows how to do that and they've done a lot of them. But I do agree with what you're saying and where we have the largest number of religious women studying with us is actually in the Jesuit School of Theology and I do think there's much for us to learn from that tradition whether it's students here, faculty here, or nationally there are a number of organizations we we could be involved with. But thank you for pointing that out. Thank you all for joining us. Thank you Lindsay again for being our guest. Thank you, President Sullivan. Thank you all for being here. We are not done. There is going to be some celebrating to happen to celebrate the opening of the school year in front of Nobili Hall.

Please join us for reception. Thank you everybody.