Professor William James, Professor of Virology, Fellow of Brasenose College and James Martin Fellow, is to become Oxford University’s Pro-Vice-Chancellor (Planning and Resources), in August.

 In the role Professor James will be responsible for institutional and strategic planning, and resource allocation.

Professor James said: ‘I’m very honoured to have been chosen to coordinate the University’s plans to make best use of its resources in support of its academic priorities. We have entered a period of financial uncertainty, and it will be important for Oxford to use its collective wisdom to sustain our unique contributions to the world of knowledge and continue to open new areas of scholarship. My role will be to ensure resources are most efficiently deployed to support these goals, and to reduce risks to our long term academic achievements by careful joint planning.’

 Among his duties as Pro-Vice-Chancellor, Professor James will chair the University’s Planning and Resource Allocation Committee; take lead responsibility for ensuring the successful implementation and evolution of the objectives within the University’s current Strategic Plan; and chair the Joint Teaching and Student Funding Review Group, developing policy following recent developments in national policy on teaching and student funding.

 The Vice-Chancellor, Professor Andrew Hamilton, said: ‘At a time of great change for higher education it is vital that we make the right decisions about how to support and sustain the excellence of our teaching and research in the years ahead. Professor James’s experience and understanding of the many different facets of Oxford education and research will be invaluable in helping us to plan for the future of our University.’

William James came to Oxford from Birmingham University in 1981, and completed a DPhil in bacterial genetics under Joel Mandelstam. He has held academic appointments in Oxford since 1984 at the Sir William Dunn School of Pathology, in conjunction with, sequentially, Linacre College, St Edmund Hall, Christ Church, Exeter College, Magdalen College and Brasenose College. He is a Medical Tutor at Brasenose, and lectures on virology to medical students.

 Professor James’s research focuses on the interaction of HIV, the AIDS virus, with cells called macrophages, which the virus uniquely subverts in order to establish infection in the body. In developing stem cells as a research tool for these studies, he founded the Oxford Stem Cell Facility, which is generously supported by the James Martin School, and this now supports researchers around Oxford and abroad working on diseases such as Parkinson’s and Chronic Granulomatous Diseases, as well as HIV/AIDS.

 Professor James will take up the post on 1 August 2011, for an initial term of five years. He will succeed Professor Tony Monaco, who has been appointed the next President of Tufts University, Massachusetts, USA.