On September 12, 2014, South China University of Technology (SCUT) and Guangdong Provincial People's Hospital (Guangdong Academy of Medical Sciences) joined forces to establish the School of Medicine. Over the past 11 years, the school has built a faculty team led by national high-level talents and a complete bachelor's-master's-doctoral talent training system. It has inaugurated four high-level Grade A tertiary affiliated hospitals: the Affiliated Guangdong Provincial People's Hospital of SCUT, the Second Affiliated Hospital, the Sixth Affiliated Hospital, and the Affiliated Zhuhai Women and Children's Hospital of SCUT. In 2017, Clinical Medicine entered the top 1% of ESI global rankings for the first time; Pharmacology & Toxicology and Molecular Biology & Genetics were listed in the top 1% of ESI in 2022 and 2024 respectively; and Immunology and Microbiology achieved this milestone in 2025. The school has blazed an innovative path of construction characterized by distinctive features, research orientation, and internationalization, forming a unique integration of medicine and engineering model. With a focus on high-level talent development, the school strives to build a world-class faculty. Currently, it has 479 full-time and part-time teachers, including 45 person-times of national high-level talents.

Adhering to the motto Integrity, Erudition, Excellence, and Benefiting the World and the concept of elite education, the School of Medicine implements a policy of selective admission, high-quality teaching, and strict graduation standards. It offers undergraduate programs such as Clinical Medicine and Medical Imaging Technology, a first-level discipline master's program in Clinical Medicine, and a professional master's degree program in Pharmaceutical Sciences. Additionally, it enrolls master's and doctoral students in Biology and Biomedical Engineering, with the complete bachelor's-master's-doctoral talent training system becoming increasingly mature. At present, the total number of students at all levels exceeds 1,200.

The School of Medicine attaches great importance to undergraduate education and teaching. It implements the professor-in-charge system, inviting renowned domestic professors such as national distinguished teachers and editors-in-chief/board members of textbooks published by People's Medical Publishing House to take the lead in undergraduate medical education. With first-class faculty guiding students, the school ensures the quality of undergraduate teaching. In the early stage, more than 20 million yuan was invested to build basic medical teaching laboratories, including the Human Anatomy Experimental Teaching Platform, Medical Morphology Experimental Teaching Platform, Medical Function Experimental Teaching Platform, Pathogenic Biology Experimental Teaching Platform, and Cell and Molecular Medicine Experimental Teaching Platform, as well as an undergraduate innovation experimental platform. These platforms offer high-level experimental teaching for undergraduate at three levels—basic, comprehensive, and design-innovative—providing robust support for their clinical practice and the development of innovative spirit, comprehensive quality, practical skills, and entrepreneurial capabilities. The school encourages medical undergraduates to take science and engineering courses such as Materials Engineering, Database, and Software Engineering, guides them in scientific and technological innovation projects, and encourages their participation in professors' research projects to broaden their horizons, forming a distinctive undergraduate education system.

Encouraging young medical talents to challenge traditions and pursue innovations, the School of Medicine adheres to the integration of basic medicine with clinical practice and of medicine with engineering. It creates all conditions for participating in tackling key national and international scientific research projects. Since its establishment, the school has obtained more than 50 national-level funded projects and over 30 provincial and ministerial-level funded projects, securing a total research fund of more than 90 million yuan. A steady stream of high-level papers has been published: in the second half of 2018 alone, 1 paper was published in Cell, 2 in Nature Communications, 1 in Cell Metabolism, and 1 in Science Signaling.

The School of Medicine actively conducts substantive exchanges and cooperation with high-level medical colleges and universities at home and abroad. It has co-founded the Joint Research Center for Regenerative Medicine with The University of Western Australia. Cooperation intentions have been reached with medical schools of prestigious universities such as Harvard University, Johns Hopkins University, Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, The University of Western Australia, McGill University, Paris Descartes University, Cardiff University, and Tohoku University in areas including joint laboratory construction, mutual visits of teaching and research personnel, joint training of graduate students, undergraduate exchanges, and joint application for research projects. The school has also appointed internationally renowned professors such as Roderic I. Pettigrew, Hiroshi Fukuda, and Jingzhi Long as visiting professors.

Seizing the opportunities of China's Double First-Class University initiative and Guangdong Province's construction of High-Level Universities and High-Level Science and Engineering Universities, the School of Medicine has invested approximately 600 million yuan in the initial phase for construction and development. It has built high-standard facilities including basic medical teaching laboratories, medical imaging clinical teaching laboratories, bioinformatics teaching laboratories, a public instrument platform, a 3.0T human magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) system experimental platform, a zebrafish research platform, an SPF laboratory animal center, PI laboratories, and a comprehensive building of the medical school, providing strong support for the rapid development of the school and the introduction of high-level talent.