It has been announced that Jesus College, Oxford has resolved to elect Professor Sir Nigel Shadbolt as its next Principal. He will be formally elected to the post in October 2014.

Sir Nigel is presently Professor of Artificial Intelligence and heads the University’s Web and Internet Science Group.

Sir Nigel has been an advisor to the UK Government across a range of data related topics since 2009. In 2012, with Sir Tim Berners-Lee, Sir Nigel founded the Open Data Institute. He was knighted in the Queen’s Birthday Honours in 2013 for services to science and engineering.

In addition to his role at Jesus College, Sir Nigel will continue his scientific research, taking up a professorship at the University of Oxford Department of Computer Science. On his appointment at Oxford, Sir Nigel will remain as Chairman of the Open Data Institute and continue his advisory role to the UK Government.

Sir Nigel will also continue to lead the SOCIAM project involving researchers from Southampton, Oxford and Edinburgh and he will remain closely involved in both the Web Science Institute and Web Science Trust amongst other initiatives. “We are all thrilled for Nigel – this is an exciting new opportunity for him. But we are also very pleased that he will stay very much engaged with the Web Science and Open Data activities that he has contributed so much to, both here at Southampton and globally, as well as the fact that we will continue to work together on these and other collaborative projects,” said Professor Dame Wendy Hall, Dean of Physical Sciences and Engineering.

He will succeed the current Jesus College Principal, Lord Krebs, in August 2015.