Professor Peter Winstanley has been selected to take up the role of Dean at Warwick Medical School.

Professor Winstanley will leave his position as Head of the School of Clinical Sciences at the University of Liverpool to join Warwick Medical School at the beginning of May 2010.

He has held his current position at the University of Liverpool since 2007. In that time he has also directed the Liverpool Biomedical Research Centre, supported by the National Institute of Clinical Research. The Liverpool BRC focuses on translational aspects of microbial diseases and is built around a novel 'managed portfolio' of projects and works with Cornell and the US Centers for Disease Control.

Professor Winstanley was born and raised in Liverpool and graduated from Liverpool Medical School in 1979. He undertook his first training posts in Merseyside, which was followed by posts at Royal Postgraduate Medical School and the Brompton Hospital. He then went on to work at the General Infirmary at Leeds and the University of Liverpool. Professor Winstanley was then awarded an MRC Training Fellowship which gave him the opportunity to undertake three years of research in Kenya (with the University of Oxford) working on the treatment of severe malaria.

He returned to the University of Liverpool in 1992 as a Senior Lecturer in Clinical Pharmacology. In 1995 he and his colleagues won Wellcome Trust support to establish a Wellcome Trust Tropical Centre (WTTC) at Liverpool. He has also worked to develop a unit in Malawi into a Wellcome Trust Major Overseas Programme as part of the Malawi-Liverpool-Wellcome Trust Programme for Research in Tropical Medicine.

Professor Winstanley said he was delighted to be joining Warwick Medical School as its Dean. He said: "This is the largest Graduate-Entry medical course in the UK set in one of the country’s best universities. I want to work with the students and staff to define Warwick's uniqueness, to make the Medical School even more attractive to applicants and to ensure that the reputation of our doctors is enhanced nationally and internationally. Warwick Medical School already has an enviable reputation in postgraduate programmes, and I want to build on that success."

Vice-Chancellor Professor Nigel Thrift said: "We are excited to appoint Professor Winstanley as the new Dean of Warwick Medical School. He is a well-respected academic with the enthusiasm and commitment to build on the School’s reputation for world-class education and research."