SAGINAW, MI —

The Covenant HealthCare Cooper campus on Saginaw's West Side will look different this spring.

Construction of Central Michigan University's College of Medicine campus at that location, 800 Cooper in Saginaw, will start this winter.

Stephen Lawrence, the associate vice president of facilities management at CMU, said the project's construction manager,

Barton Malow

,

will award the majority of the subcontractor contracts in late January or early February.

Construction is scheduled to be completed by May 1, 2015, on the

two-story, 52,100-square-foot structure with clinical space, classrooms and simulation lab.

In the second phase of the project, CMU will construct a campus at St. Mary's of Michigan, 800 S. Washington.

CMU is paying for the $25 million project with $10 million from savings, $5.5 million from the CMU Medical Education Partners and $9.7 million in fundraising by CMU, Covenant and St. Mary's of Michigan.

CMU will open its Saginaw medical school operations in 2015.

The college accepted its first class of 64 students last year. The students started the four-year program in August.

Students will spend two years in Mount Pleasant and two years doing clinical work in

hospitals in Saginaw and throughout northern and mid-Michigan and the Upper Peninsula.

The college is aimed at training doctors to work in Michigan’s under-served rural and urban communities in emergency medicine, family practice, pediatrics, internal medicine, general surgery, and obstetrics and gynecology. The Association of American Medical Colleges projects a shortage of 6,000 physicians in Michigan by 2020 and recommends a 30 percent increase in medical school enrollment by 2015. About 25 percent of the U.S. population lives in rural areas, with 10 percent of physicians practicing in those areas.

— Lindsay Knake covers education for MLive/The Saginaw News. Follow her on twitter or contact her at 989-372-2498 or lknake@mlive.com.