Kezia Dugdale, the former Scottish Labour leader, has confirmed she is to quit Holyrood to run a thinktank challenging the surge in populist and nativist politics around the world.

Dugdale said she would remain a Labour party member despite her long-standing and often public disputes with Jeremy Corbyn over Brexit and other areas of policy.

A law graduate with an MSc in policy studies, she is to become director of the John Smith Centre for Public Service at the University of Glasgow, splitting her time there with lecturing in the university’s school of politics.

She said the centre, named after the Labour leader who died in 1994, was apolitical and would be focused on restoring faith in fact-based politics.

Its board includes Ruth Davidson, the Scottish Tory leader, Ed Balls, the former Labour chancellor, and Andrew Wilson, a Scottish National party adviser and former MSP. It would focus on the UK but also cover the rise in identity-based populism across the world, she said.

She said her 12 years working at Holyrood made her an ideal candidate for the role. She started as a researcher and served eight years as an MSP, including two years as Scottish Labour leader, during which she fought four elections and the independence referendum.

“I have seen first hand some of the growing challenges we face not just in the UK but around the world, whether that’s the growth of identity-led politics, more emotional politics, more questioning of fact and rational-based thinking, which I find quite worrying,” she said.

Dugdale said the challenges included the abusive, tribal behaviour of some political activists in Scotland. She won a difficult libel action last month brought against her by Stuart Campbell, a hardline nationalist blogger known as Wings over Scotland, whom she accused of being homophobic.

“Many of these challenges of the future are global challenges [that] countries will have to get to grips with,” she said.

It is widely thought Dugdale’s deep policy differences and fractious internal disputes with Corbyn and his allies pushed her to accept the post, which she said she was offered after being approached by the university’s headhunters in February.

She refused to comment on her conflicts with Corbyn over Brexit but denied that fear of being deselected before the next Holyrood elections in 2021 drove her to quit first. She had planned to stand again in 2021 but admitted to being worried by the number of party members who had quit over Corbyn’s stance on Brexit.

Dugdale was elected as an MSP on the Lothians regional list under Holyrood’s proportional voting system. As her seat is not based on a first-past-the-post contest, her departure in July will not trigger a byelection.

The next Labour candidate on that list is Sarah Boyack, a former Labour MSP and minister, who is also close to the party’s centrists, followed by Lesley Hinds, a former Labour councillor in Edinburgh. Neither have yet publicly declared they would take up Dugdale’s seat.

• This article was amended on 30 April 2019. An earlier version misnamed the John Smith Centre for Public Service as the “John Smith Centre for Public Policy”.