RUMS News -

Senior appointments

I am delighted to report the appointment of a new leadership team in the School of Life and Medical Sciences, brought about by the imminent departure of Professor Ed Byrne to become Vice-Chancellor of Monash University in Australia, and the forthcoming retirement of Professor Peter Mobbs, currently Dean of Life Sciences.

The new Vice-Provost (Health), in succession to Professor Ed Byrne, is to be Professor Sir John Tooke, a distinguished clinician scientist with a specialisation in diabetes and vascular health. He is presently Professor of Vascular Medicine at the U niversity of Exeter and he was the Inaugural Dean of the Peninsula Medical School. He has made a major contribution to national policy in relation to medicine, including as Chairman of the Council of Heads of Medical Schools and of the UK Health Education Advisory Committee. He was the author of the Tooke Report that followed the debacle of the appointment of junior doctors, and which held the Government to account for its failures in implementing a flawed scheme, while also pointing up an alternative approach which has since been implemented and proved successful. He is also a Member of the reconfigured National Institute for Health Research Advisory Board, the Universities UK Health and Social Care Policy Committee and the NHS Evidence Advisory Board. He was knighted in the 2007 New Year’s Honours list for Services to Medicine.

This is an outstanding appointment for UCL, to a job which was widely recognised by all whom we consulted in the course of a global search as simply the most important and most exciting biomedical leadership post in the UK today. He will lead the School of Life and Medical Sciences (SLMS) and have responsibility for leadership in respect of health across UCL. Sir John will take up his appointment from 1 January 2010.

Two new Deans have also been appointed, following the normal processes of internal consultation.

The new Dean of Life Sciences will be Professor Mary Collins, presently head of the UCL Division of Infection and Immunity. Her research interests are in gene therapy and vaccines, and she leads a research team of approximately 10 PhD students and post-doctoral fellows engineer viruses for experimental and clinical gene delivery. Recently they have produced the first stable packaging for lentiviral vectors, and have investigated the use of lentiviral vectors as cancer vaccines. Mary Collins has been Professor of Immunology at UCL since 1997. She was appointed Director of the Medical Research Council/UCL Centre for Medical Molecular Virology in 2005. She was a member of the HEFCE sub-panel for the Infection & Immunology unit of assessment in the 2008 Research Assessment Exer cise (RAE 2008); and was also a member and key contributor to the work of UCL’s RAE 2008 Strategy Group. Professor Collins is a Fellow of the Academy of Medical Science: further details are on her personal webpage. She will succeed Peter Mobbs from 1 September 2009.

The new Dean of the Faculty of Biomedical Sciences will be Professor Ian Jacobs, an oncological gynaecologist and Director of the Institute for Women’s Health. He is also Research Dean in the Faculty and played a major part in our recent setting up of UCL Partners, our Academic Health Sciences Centre. He first moved to UCL and UCLH in 2004 as Professor of Gynaecological Cancer Surgery, to set up and direct the new UCL Institute for Women’s Health. Since 2006, as Research Dean and Director of Research & Development (R&D) he has led on the merger of UCL, UCLH and Royal Free R&D, the successful bid for a UCLH/UCL Comprehensive Biomedical Research Centre and the establishment of the UCL and NHS partners’ Health Sciences Research Deanery. Most recently he led on the presentation to the Department of Health for the UCL Partners Academic Health Sciences Centre. Professor Jacobs directs a laboratory and clinical research team with grant awards of over £30m from the Medical Research Council, Cancer Research UK and Department of Health, focused on molecular genetics, proteomics and screening for cancer. He is principal investigator on several large multicentre clinical trials including UKCTOCS, a randomised trial of ovarian cancer screening involving 202,000 women and the UK Familial Ovarian Cancer Screening Study. Professor Jacobs has a strong commitment to health in the developing world through his role in establishing and directing the Uganda Women’s Health Initiative involving UCL, Makerere University and Mulago Hospital. He founded the Gynaecology Cancer Research Fund and has been President of the British Gynaecological Cancer Society and European Society of Gynaecological Oncologists. He is currently Chair of the North Central London Research Network and a member of the MRC Translational Strategy Committee, alongside charitable roles as Medical Director of the Eve Appeal and Patron of Safehands for Women. His appointment will take effect from 1 July 2009.

This is a remarkably strong team for the strategic leadership of biomedicine at UCL, and for our contribution to such major projects as the UK Centre for Medical Research and Innovation at St Pancras. The three new appointees will also be members of the Provost’s Senior Management Team, sharing with me and the other Vice-Provosts, Deans and senior officers responsibility for the management of UCL as a whole.


- Extracted from the Provtost's Newsletter.