A 10-year veteran of the University of California, Los Angeles “engaged in research misconduct by knowingly and recklessly” faking data in 11 different grant applications, according to a U.S. federal watchdog.
[Please see an update on this post; UCLA now says one of the 11 grant applications did not include faked data.]
Janina Jiang, who joined UCLA’s pathology and laboratory medicine department in 2010, faked “flow cytometry data to represent interferon-γ (IFN-γ) expression in immune cells of mice administered with human recombinant vaults such that the represented data were incompatible with the raw experimental data,” the Office of Research Integrity said in its findings earlier this week.
Jiang, who appears to work at a lab at UCLA affiliate hospital Cedars Sinai, agreed to three years of supervision for any federally funded work. She has not responded to a request for comment from Retraction Watch.
Three of the eleven grant applications were funded for a total $58.7 million. Steven M. Dubinett – now the interim dean at UCLA – is listed as principal investigator on one of the grants, which helped fund the UCLA Clinical and Translational Science Institute and comprised the vast majority of the $58.7 million. The extent of Jiang’s part in that application and the extent to which they led to the success of the grant is unclear, but it seems likely they were a minor contribution.
We asked UCLA what prompted the investigation, when Jiang left her employment there, and to share the investigation report. A spokesperson did not respond to the first or third questions, sending just this statement:
UCLA conducted an investigation in accordance with Policy 993 – responding to allegations of research misconduct. Our records indicate that she held an assistant researcher position in the Department of Pathology and Laboratory Medicine from May 2010 through June 2018 and the Semel Institute for Neuroscience and Human Behavior from July 2018 through August 2020.
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Those consequences don’t even justify the trouble of investigating it.
Three-year supervision…? Faking data in no less than 11 grant applications to swindle grant money off Governments or other Institutions should be more than enough to get kicked out of any publicly or privately funded research endeavor. Forever.
Agree! She’s a proven liar and cannot be trusted. How many grant dollars were not given to recipients who also qualified for those dollars?
The punishment should be severe.
She should be charged with mail or wire fraud- which is a federal crime.
Most people believe what is written in these journals. They don’t think articles that are published in medical journals are compromised. From doctors that syphon money from grants, to the institutions with obvious conflicts of interest, there is constant proof within the folds, like retraction watch. It is beyond frustrating when you are trying to reason with these people.