Waikato med school’s double whammy for rankings and funding

Tuesday, 5 May 2026

University of Waikato Deputy Vice Chancellor Research Gary Wilson (left) and Vice-Chancellor Neil Quigley say the new medical school will open up interdisciplinary collaboration.

Waikato’s new medical school will turbo charge the university’s global ranking and make it more attractive to the Government and others for funding.

Near the building site, dominated by a crane and busy with workers, Vice-Chancellor Neil Quigley and Deputy Vice-Chancellor Research Gary Wilson spoke to Waikato Times about what the long-awaited New Zealand Graduate School of Medicine will mean for the university.

Quigley said Australian universities that had established medical schools in the past 25 years and subsequently improved their international rankings.

Construction is underway on the University of Waikato medical school’s teaching and learning building

“It won’t happen like tomorrow, but I would expect that having a medical school will be positive for our international rankings,” he said.

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It would be a struggle to find a top-100 university globally that didn’t have a medical school, he said.

Currently the QS World University Rankings places Waikato 281 out of more than 1500 of the world's top universities. It is in the 401–500 bracket on the Times Higher Education ranking of more than 2000 institutions. On both lists it ranks below both the University of Auckland and the University of Otago, where New Zealand’s two other medical schools are based.

Quigley said Waikato University was already doing well for its size in terms of research, but predicted a snowball effect.

Rankings were assessed by a range of factors, including citations in academic literature, recognition by other academics internationally, and the ability to secure funding.

Medical schools contributed to these measures because of the volume and impact of health-related research.

Fosters are leading construction of the four-storey medical teaching and learning building, which has been designed by architects Chow Hill.

“People in both medicine and in the sciences around medicine tend to publish quite a lot,” he said, leading to “much higher rates of publication and citation of those publications”.

Staff-to-student ratios were another contributing factor, and were higher in medicine than in subjects such as the arts.

The medical school — which will be the first to open in New Zealand in almost six decades when it welcomes its first 120-student intake in 2028 — was given the Government green light last July, and a ground-breaking ceremony in December kicked off construction.

Research was expected to span both traditional biomedical fields and broader approaches to community health.

Wilson said it would include research into cancer, cardiovascular issues and respiratory disease, as well as a greater emphasis on care outside hospital settings.

The New Zealand Graduate School of Medicine will open for students in 2028

“We’re thinking more broadly about societal well-being and how we get health research into society more, and can take a bit more of an angle on preventative health.”

The Health Research Council of New Zealand, the principal government funder of health research, was already focusing on issues including rural health and Māori and Pacific health, he said.

“In some sense, what we're doing is responsive to government need and government pull.”

Interdisciplinary collaboration was already emerging, and the medical school would mean more opportunities for fields such as biochemistry, bioengineering, psychology and AI to work on applied health issues.

Clinical trials would test medicines, methodologies and the use of wearable technology — for example, for diabetes, software detailing a person’s current condition and steps to manage it.

“We’ve been very successful in diabetes research for some time now, but this is a real opportunity to scale it up and take a more clinical approach.”

Research funding came from a range of sources. The government Health Research Council put about $120 million a year into health research, he said, and the university would have opportunities to harness some of this.

“The Government funding landscape is changing, but that funding will start to fall into a new pillar of Research Funding New Zealand, which will be focused on health and well-being. They may well put a bit more government money into it.”

The Government was looking at the opportunity for direct investment where it wanted a specific outcome, and Waikato was “really well placed” for rural health issues in particular.

Commercial entities, foundations and philanthropic backing would also play a role. Internationally, there was a lot of funding available, Wilson said.

Quigley said in the past the “lion’s share” of research budgets had gone to Auckland and Otago, as had philanthropic support nationally as well as locally, but the new medical school would build expertise and research, increasing competition.

The medical school will cost $230 million, with the Government contributing $83 million, and the university will fund the remaining $150 million. Fundraising was “going well”, he said, though he did not specify a figure.

The university had nearly finished planning the location of clinical placements for medical students, and an update would come in the next few weeks.