In 1944 Wager was appointed to the chair of geology at the University of Durham, and after being elected a Fellow of the Royal Society two years later, moved to the University of Oxford in 1950 as Professor of Geology (along with a fellowship at University College, Oxford). There he helped to modernise what had been a failing department. He made a further expedition to Greenland in 1953, but in 1955 a heart attack put an end to his career as an active mountaineer and explorer. His academic work was unaffected however, and he became active in the fields of geological age determination and isotope geochemistry. He was also a key driving force in the founding of two geological journals - "Geochimica et Cosmochimica Acta" in 1950 and "Journal of Petrology" in 1960. In 1965 he died suddenly as a result of a second heart attack. His book "Layered Igneous Rocks", written with his protégé Malcolm Brown, was published posthumously in 1968, and became a standard text. The International Association of Volcanology and Chemistry of the Earth's Interior awards the Wager Medal in his honour.