Gov. Mark Dayton laid out a funding plan Wednesday designed to elevate the University of Minnesota Medical School's national reputation and bolster its role as a driver of health innovation and job creation.

As part of his slow rollout of pieces of his budget plan, which will be revealed in full Tuesday, Dayton said he'll ask for $30 million this two-year budget cycle for the medical school.

He said he intends to follow that up with $50 million in the next biennium and envisions a total of $230 million for the decade.

The money, which Dayton said he would not pit against other funding requests the U has made this session, would pay for 50 more medical researchers over the next eight years. The school has lost about 100 tenured faculty over the past 20 years, officials said.

The new faculty would form "medical discovery teams" to tackle pressing health issues and attempt to attract additional National Institutes of Health grants.

Dr. Brooks Jackson, the medical school dean, said the U ranks 30th out of 144 medical schools, based on NIH grants.

Jackson's goal with the new funding would be to get to 20th within five years. Within a decade, he said, he hopes to move the school into the top 14 or even the top 10.

The new money "really will be transformative in the sense that it will allow us to leverage our current strengths to really become a world-class medical school, not just in terms of research but as well as training the next generation of students," Jackson said.

The chairs of the higher education committees in the state Senate and House said Wednesday they supported the governor's plan in concept.

Richard Beeson, who chairs the Board of Regents, the U's governing body, said the board will take up the proposal next month. He said regents are generally supportive of the plan because it is intended to be in addition to the funding requests they've made.

See the original post here:

Dayton wants $30M for U med school