Rutgers Biomedical and Health Sciences (RBHS) officials told the Senate Higher Education Committee they are combining New Jersey Medical School (NJMS) in Newark and Robert Wood Johnson Medical School (RWJMS) in New Brunswick into a single Rutgers School of Medicine to increase scale for research, clinical trials and specialist recruitment.

Dr. Brian Strom, chancellor of Rutgers Biomedical and Health Sciences, said the 2012 Higher Education Restructuring Act created RBHS and that subsequent internal review led the university to seek greater integration of the two medical schools. “The merger was transformational for Rutgers,” Strom said, describing RBHS’s growth in extramural research funds — a total he put at roughly $4,000,000,000 since RBHS’s founding — and research awards that the university expects to exceed $600,000,000 this fiscal year.

Strom said the medical‑school integration is driven primarily by academic and clinical goals rather than short‑term financial cuts. The combined medical school will operate on two comparable campuses; the university has begun harmonizing admissions, curricula and grading policies and plans a self‑study for the Liaison Committee on Medical Education (LCME) with a site visit scheduled in early 2027 and first matriculating class in 2028 if approvals proceed.

Strom explained the advantages of scale: a larger patient base across Newark and New Brunswick will make it easier to recruit clinicians who need a sufficiently large practice panel, and will increase competitiveness for clinical trials and advanced therapies that could otherwise require patients to travel out of state. He also said the merger accelerated capital investments, including a full renovation of the Medical Science Building in Newark and planned construction on the HELIX site in New Brunswick as part of more than $1,000,000,000 in health‑campus investments.

Committee members asked about community concerns, especially in Newark, where some residents and stakeholders worried consolidation might reduce services or jobs. Strom said the university has stepped up community outreach — town halls, a community involvement task force and meetings with local leaders — and emphasized RBHS is investing in both Newark and New Brunswick and remains bound to clinical partnerships such as University Hospital in Newark and RWJBarnabas Health.

Strom said some programmatic enrollments (for example, medical‑school class sizes) are not expanding because clinical training sites are the limiting factor. He noted applications to the medical schools have increased markedly and said the integrated school will strengthen recruitment and research competitiveness, projecting the combined school will rank in the top 50 nationally for NIH funding.