In 1962, the fledgling university began searching for a dean to head its planned medical school, which would be the first such institution in San Diego County.

[1] The concept was based on the successful models of public medical education and practice in San Francisco and Los Angeles.

The man eventually chosen was Joseph Stokes III, an expert in the fields of preventive medicine and cardiovascular epidemiology.

[2] Stokes played a key role in aggressively recruiting leading physician scientists of its era and rapidly building the institute's reputation as an elite medical school.

[3] His efforts were aided by the campus's existing strengths in the biological sciences and close proximity to the famed Salk Institute.

The first cohort of medical students, 39 men and 8 women, enrolled in 1968,[4] while construction on the clinical science building and adjacent 100-bed Veterans Administration Hospital were still ongoing.

[4] In 1973, Helen Ranney joined the faculty, and would become the first American woman to be chair of the department of medicine at a medical school.

Exceptions are the Rita Atkinson Residences, which houses 450 graduate students in a nine-story, two-tower structure,[9] and the Club Med dining facility at the base of the telemedicine building.

[10] The fourteenth work, Standing by Kiki Smith, is a nude bronze woman raised on a concrete eucalyptus trunk trickling water from her hands to its roots.

[18] The Independent Study Project (ISP) has long been a cornerstone of the elective curriculum at the UCSD School of Medicine.

Students are required to complete a project under the direction of an ISP committee usually consisting of three or more School of Medicine faculty.

These affiliations include the Perdana University Graduate School of Medicine, La Jolla Institute for Immunology, Rady Children's Hospital, the Salk Institute for Biological Studies, San Diego Supercomputer Center, Sanford Burnham Prebys, Scripps Institution of Oceanography, Scripps Research, St. Vincent de Paul Village Family Health Center, UC San Diego Health, Indian Health Service, and the VA San Diego Healthcare System.