A former endowed professor at the University of Kentucky has resigned from the faculty days before a committee at the institution was scheduled to vote on whether to fire him for misconduct, Retraction Watch has learned.
In 2018, the university began investigating Xianglin Shi, a toxicologist and cancer biologist who that year, as we reported then, lost three papers in the Journal of Biological Chemistry for image manipulation. At the time, Shi was the principal investigator of a 5-year, $7.4 million grant from the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences to establish the UK Center for Appalachian Research in Environmental Sciences (UK-CARES).
In the wake of the retractions, Shi was stripped of his title as the William A. Marquard Chair in Cancer Research and his role as associate dean for research integration in the UK College of Medicine.
In August 2019, UK said that it intended to fire Shi and a colleague, Zhuo Zhang, also of the Department of Toxicology and Cancer Biology in the College of Medicine. A third member of the group, Donghern Kim, had already been dismissed in the scandal.
The university found “some instances of an intentional effort to deceive, and in other instances, careless and reckless handling of experimental data and figure construction for grants and publications.”
As the Lexington Herald Leader reported earlier this week, the culmination of that process was going to be a June 16 meeting of the UK’s Board of Trustees, where, for the first time, according to the newspaper, the board would hold a vote on the firing of a tenured member of the faculty.
But Jay Blanton, a spokesman for the school, told Retraction Watch today that Shi submitted his resignation, effective June 15, the day before the board was scheduled to meet about his case.
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“Shi was the principal investigator of a 5-year, $7.4 million grant from the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences to establish the UK Center for Appalachian Research in Environmental Sciences (UK-CARES).”
More fool National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences!
Wonder if Ming-Hui Zou will resign.
http://retractionwatch.com/2020/05/20/associate-vp-for-research-at-georgia-state-is-up-to-10-retractions/
Xianglin Shi has 8 retractions,
http://retractiondatabase.org/RetractionSearch.aspx#?auth%3dXianglin%2bShi
whereas Ming-Hui Zou has 12 retractions.
http://retractiondatabase.org/RetractionSearch.aspx#?auth%3dming-hui%2bzou
Would be nice to explain at the beginning the “UK” abbreviation, for a time I was wondering what is the link between the Appalachian Mountains and the United Kingdom…
I actually appreciate that the author felt no need to spell out, again, the name of the institution which appeared a mere paragraph (appropriately, in the first paragraph of the article) away from the first use of “UK”.
He assumed, if he thought about it at all, that readers of Retraction Watch are adults with reasonable attention spans. Thanks for that, Mr. Marcus.
Anna Sawicka made a perfectly serious and politely-phrased point. It wasn’t obvious what UK meant because it wasn’t explained. Please don’t sneer at people with different backgrounds.
“Jay Blanton… told Retraction Watch today that Shi submitted his resignation, effective June 15, the day before the board was scheduled to meet about his case.”
I suppose it would depend upon the terms of the employment contract, rules and regs of employment at the institution … the question is this “does the unilateral act of one party to an employment agreement of submitting a resignation terminate the employer/employee relationship? A resignation could be deemed a unilateral offer to terminate a contractual relationship. Only if the offer is accepted is the employment contract terminated. Employee-you can’t quit unless I employer agree, but I can fire you. So you may have resigned [in your mind] but the contract was terminated by its terms and there was no provision in the contract for unilateral termination. It seems wise for institutions to have provisions that may regulate how these employment agreements are ended.