Prof Jason Arday said he had "concluded that the only way to bring this chapter to an end is to step away".

A University of Cambridge professor at the centre of a plagiarism row has resigned "with immediate effect". On Wednesday the university said it had launched an investigation into Professor Jason Arday "following new information" about his "academic qualifications and honorary appointments". Arday - who became the university's youngest ever black professor in 2023 - has admitted errors in his work, but said he had faced "an unrelenting level of public scrutiny and personal attack" and was not a "liar". It came after a series of media reports questioning some of his achievements and allegations of plagiarism in his PhD thesis. Arday said he had "concluded that the only way to bring this chapter to an end is to step away". In the statement posted by the Good Law Project on Wednesday, Arday said that being appointed professor had been "without question, the greatest professional privilege of my life". He said his resignation should not "be interpreted as a loss of faith in scholarship or in the values that first brought me to Cambridge. "Nor should it be mistaken for an acceptance of the narratives that have surrounded me."