UofU School of Medicine to be renamed after $110M gift

The University of Utah has announced a landmark gift of $110 million for its School of Medicine from the George S. and Dolores Doré Eccles Foundation and the Nora Eccles Treadwell Foundation.

The gift will further accelerate the nationally recognized school’s ability to provide the highest-quality medical education, advanced research and patient care, dramatically increasing the school’s endowment and powering critical research, the institution said. It will also enable the construction of a state-of-the-art new home for the School of Medicine on the health sciences campus.

President Emerita Ruth V. Watkins and Interim President Dr. Michael Good announced that the university would rename the school the Spencer Fox Eccles School of Medicine at the University of Utah.

“Through leadership spanning more than five decades, the Eccles family has shaped the University of Utah with remarkable breadth and depth — especially within the health sciences,” Watkins said. “In particular, Spence has been a leading champion. He has passionately built upon his family’s legacy to advance the University of Utah School of Medicine into a top-tier integrated academic medical institution. Today, he and his family foundations make their boldest and most forward-looking investment for the health of all Utahns. For these reasons and more, we are honored to have the School of Medicine bear his name.”

“This gift sets the course for the future of the School of Medicine,” Good added. “Medical education has advanced significantly in recent decades as new discoveries and technologies emerge. At the same time, the state of Utah is experiencing a need for more physicians, particularly in rural areas. This gift presents a unique opportunity: We will provide the most advanced education to raise new generations of healthcare professionals who will, in turn, improve health for our state and region.”

“I have long believed that no state or region can become truly great without a world-class medical center at its nucleus,” Spence Eccles said. “We hope this seminal grant — the largest ever awarded by our foundations — will help ensure the university not only provides the highest-quality medical education for the doctors who serve Utah and the entire Intermountain West, but also furthers the excellence of healthcare for all our citizens and impacts the future of medicine through its groundbreaking research.”