By Katherine Mangan

G. Richard Olds knew he was taking on a challenge when he accepted the job as dean of California's first new public medical school in more than four decades, at the University of California at Riverside.

A tropical-disease specialist who has worked in some of the poorest parts of the world, Dr. Olds, 59, had been tapped to help start a school in a neglected region of a financially strapped state.

But the task became even more daunting when he learned, just weeks before his February 1 starting date, that the $10-million that University of California regents had recommended to help get the medical school off the ground had been eliminated in the budget that Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger sent on to the Legislature.

The new dean is taking the setback in stride.

"It would have been nice if the governor hadn't removed the $10-million, but then I guess it wouldn't have been the same challenge," says Dr. Olds, who had been chair of medicine at the Medical College of Wisconsin since 2000.

The California regents voted in 2008 to approve establishment of the new Riverside medical school, which is scheduled to enroll its first class of 50 students in the fall of 2012. The school will expand upon an existing biomedical-sciences program that offers the first two years of medical study at Riverside, followed by two years at the University of California at Los Angeles.

Riverside's chancellor, Timothy P. White, has offered to redirect about $20-million over the next two years from discretionary funds and interest on investments to cover the gap if state lawmakers don't approve the start-up money for the new school. "We're not going to take a knee and stop on this effort just because times are tough," Mr. White says. The worst-case scenario, he adds, is that the first class would start a year later, in 2013.

Dr. Olds, who also serves as vice chancellor for health affairs at Riverside, plans to do what he's done throughout his career in international health: tap into the local community both to recruit young people into medicine and to tackle pressing health problems.

Forty-five percent of the approximately four million people living in the Southern California region served by the medical school are Hispanic, but only 3 percent of the physicians are, Dr. Olds says. The rapidly growing area has a shortage of about 3,000 doctors and high rates of diabetes, heart disease, and infant mortality.

The new school will focus on wellness and prevention and seek to attract a diverse work force, in part by expanding partnerships with local high schools, he says.

"I believe that a medical school should be a catalyst to improve the health of the community it serves," Dr. Olds says.

The chancellor says the new dean is an accomplished physician and medical educator. "But what differentiated him was that he is also an entrepreneur," says Mr. White. "He understands how to build things."

He says he was impressed by a story Dr. Olds told about how he had observed residents of a small island in the Philippines confront a doctor shortage by having community members nominate promising high-school students. Each of those who pursued medical training in local villages stayed on the island to practice, and their scores on medical entrance tests were higher than those of their counterparts at the University of the Philippines.

Dr. Olds became interested in international health issues while his father was stationed in Switzerland as a United Nations ambassador. During college, he worked with refugee-assistance groups based in Geneva and Vienna. He attended medical school at Case Western Reserve University and later taught medicine and led a global-health institute at Brown University. He has served on a World Health Organization committee studying schistosomiasis, a parasitic disease common in parts of Africa, Asia, and South America. Such work has prepared him well for his current job, he says.

"As a tropical-disease specialist, I'm used to serving a very diverse patient population and taking on difficult challenges," Dr. Olds says. His new job promises to offer plenty of those.