London

Roy Anderson, one of Britain's leading epidemiologists, has resigned as director of an Oxford-based research centre financed by the Wellcome Trust, following two damning reports on the way that the centre has been managed.

An independent management report, which criticizes both the University of Oxford and the trust for not keeping a close enough eye on the situation, will be a blow to both institutions.

The Wellcome Trust, which funds the Centre for the Epidemiology of Infectious Diseases at Oxford, this week released a management review and interim audit review of the centre. Both reviews began earlier this year when Anderson was suspended following a series of complaints about his behaviour during staff appointment procedures (see Nature 403, 353; 2000 & Nature 403, 695; 2000).

The reviews found that centre research staff supported by the trust had accepted commercial grants worth £250,000 from a number of sources — including the company IBHSC Ltd in which Anderson owns a third of the shares.

But Anderson had failed to make a full disclosure of his interests in his company IBHSC Ltd to either the trust or the university, as required of Wellcome grant holders.

However, the interim audit, which was produced jointly by PricewaterhouseCoopers and the university's chief internal auditor, found no evidence of financial impropriety.

The independent management review was chaired by Sir Dai Rees, the former chief executive of the Medical Research Council. Its report says that the centre suffers from “autocratic management”, festering tensions and disagreements, discouragement of independent views and growing tensions between the centre and the university's department of zoology to which it belongs.

Mike Dexter, director of the Wellcome Trust, says trustees were “obviously distressed” at the events surrounding the centre. He said there was “no question of the scientific credibility of Roy Anderson or the centre. It is doing first class work and our priority is to maintain that.”

Anderson remains a governor of the Wellcome Trust, although Dexter says that his position “remains to be discussed”.