A few years ago, funding for the UCLA pathology lab where Janina Jiang had worked since 2010 was running out.
The head of the lab was grateful when another scientist offered to chip in $50,000 to keep Jiang on for six more months.
But some of the experiments Jiang – perhaps feeling that her job was on the line, a colleague speculated – ran for that scientist raised suspicions. Other experiments didn’t corroborate her results, and Jiang failed to provide all her raw data.
Jiang’s benefactor asked another staff scientist to review and reanalyze her work.
What he found spurred an institutional investigation, which in July 2021 found Jiang faked data representing flow cytometry experiments in several figures included in 11 grant proposals, resulting in 19 counts of research misconduct.
The investigation report, which was released to us via a public records request after UCLA redacted most of the names of the other scientists Jiang worked with, concluded that she improperly conducted the experiments in question – and that she had enough experience in the field to know what she was doing.
Jiang did not respond to the investigation committee’s request for an interview or to the final report, but did agree to federal sanctions based on the findings in a settlement the U.S. Office of Research Integrity (ORI) announced in August – a year after UCLA’s investigation concluded.
At the time, we reported that Jiang appeared to work in a lab at Cedars-Sinai, but her name is no longer on the lab website. A spokesperson for the hospital told us the researcher has not been employed there since the end of August. Jiang did not respond to our request for comment for the original story, and we have not been able to find other contact info.
The university’s report contains what a UCLA official later described to ORI as “erroneous information” that indicated some of Jiang’s tainted work was funded with federal money when in fact it wasn’t. The principal investigator of that grant is currently the interim dean of UCLA’s medical school.
How the mistake happened is unclear, as is why UCLA re-examined its records after ORI announced the settlement with Jiang. But the university’s pleas to the federal watchdog – in two letters we also obtained through a public records request – resulted in an unusual correction to the Federal Register notice about ORI’s findings.
Neither UCLA nor ORI answered our questions about how the report included such a significant mistake, so we ended our post about the correction with a note that we would “continue to pursue answers” – and filed public records requests.
Jiang came to work at UCLA in 2010, after earning a medical degree from Tongji Medical University in China, a PhD from McMaster University in Canada, and training as a postdoc in a gastroenterology lab at Stanford University in California.
The UCLA pathology lab that Jiang worked in focused on mucosal immunology in the female reproductive tract, and she co-authored several papers about developing a vaccine for chlamydia, some with a type of nanoparticle discovered at UCLA called “vaults.”
The leader of the lab, whose name is redacted in UCLA’s report, said she never had any concerns about the data Jiang generated.
“It all matched everything else the other people in the lab were doing and independently of her,” the lab leader told the investigation committee. “So, I had no reason to ever think that there was anything wrong.”
In 2015, Jiang began working with another UCLA professor who was developing vaccines for HIV and HPV with the same type of vault nanoparticles.
As funding for the lab where Jiang had been working began to run out, this scientist contributed $50,000 to extend Jiang’s salary for six months as she did more work for his lab. She performed experiments for him to evaluate the immune response to the vaccines in mice using flow cytometry, the results of which were included in several grant applications.
The investigation committee asked the leader of the lab where Jiang had been working since 2010 if receiving funding for the grants would have allowed Jiang to keep her job.
“Yes,” the scientist said. Jiang’s “fairly sizable salary” meant that funding was necessary in order to keep her on board. “That’s why it was so kind when” the other scientist “kicked in $50,000 just to keep her on for a half a year. It was like, yay.”
Another scientist the committee interviewed speculated that Jiang may have felt “under pressure,” because her longtime boss “was running out of funding, and she [Respondent] was going to have to leave.”
Jiang “expressed a great deal of interest in staying, in working,” said the scientist, whose name was redacted in the report. “She was hoping that the vault work would take off and that she could continue to be involved in it.”
From the experimental results Jiang provided, it looked like the mice had a “really robust” immune response to the vaccines, according to one of the scientists the committee interviewed. But when other collaborators tried an experiment with monkeys, “we did not see any of these results.”
Jiang was asked to do another type of experiment to measure immune activity, called ELISpot. When she did, the results didn’t line up with her flow cytometry findings.
“She couldn’t get them to work, she couldn’t get them to show anything,” said one of the scientists interviewed. That rang “alarm bells,” the scientist said, “because ELISpot is technically easier and faster and much more sensitive than flow cytometry… And it’s not possible to fabricate the results because you have the plates right there, with the spots right there.”
At some point, the scientist funding Jiang’s salary extension asked for her raw flow cytometry data. She initially failed to provide the data, which raised suspicions.
When Jiang did later provide raw data, it was only for some of the experiments. The scientist funding her salary asked another staff research scientist to review and re-analyze Jiang’s data.
“It’s pretty uncomfortable to analyze data for another scientist,” that researcher told the investigation committee. Especially when the re-analysis showed different results, no greater immune response to the experimental vaccines.
“It felt like a bomb,” the scientist who re-analyzed Jiang’s work said of one of the experiments, “because I found nothing.”
The lab where Jiang had been working ran out of funding in 2018, and she started a new position at UCLA’s Semel Institute for Neuroscience and Human Behavior that year.
The scientist who had extended Jiang’s salary reported the suspected scientific misconduct to a UCLA administrator in a letter dated January 10, 2019. An inquiry began later that year, followed by an investigation that began in 2020 and concluded with a report dated July 27, 2021. Jiang left UCLA in August of 2020.
Based on the work of the scientist who re-analyzed Jiang’s data and the investigation committee’s own analysis, the committee found that Jiang had not conducted the flow cytometry experiments properly. Among other issues, she had focused the flow cytometer’s results on live immune cells for the samples from mice that had received the experimental vaccines, but on dead cells for the negative control samples.
“This is not the appropriate way of analyzing that type of data,” the committee wrote.
“Respondent had to know that there was a substantial risk associated with her actions,” the report said, “because she had extensive experience in this field and understood what she was doing. Thus, the preponderance of the evidence points to the conclusion that these data was knowingly falsified.”
Of 19 allegations of research misconduct, many regarding figures that were reused in multiple grant applications, the committee found Jiang had falsified data in each instance “by reporting immune response results that are incompatible with the raw data files.”
On August 5th of this year, ORI announced its settlement with Jiang and summarized the findings against her, listing 11 grant applications to which it said she contributed faked flow cytometry data.
One of those grant applications was significantly larger than the others – UL1 TR000124, which helped fund the UCLA Clinical and Translational Science Institute (CTSI), to the tune of $57 million from 2012-2015. The listed principal investigator, Steven M. Dubinett, is the interim dean for UCLA’s David Geffen School of Medicine.
In the two letters released to us via a public records request, Roger M. Wakimoto, UCLA’s vice chancellor for research and creative activities, requested that ORI correct the Federal Register notice with the findings, saying that the faked figure was not submitted with the grant application for CTSI.
Wakimoto’s first letter, dated August 16th, said that the allegation regarding the CTSI grant involved a proposal submitted to “an intramural granting program supported by funds from the CTSI award,” not to the National Institutes of Health (NIH).
Indeed, the first allegation in UCLA’s investigation report concerns a proposal for what’s described as an “Iris Cantor Women’s Center/ UCLA CTSI grant” that lists “NCATS UCLA CTSI Grant # UL1TR000124” as its apparent source of funding. The other allegations specifically note that proposals were directed to the NIH.
Whether ORI responded to the first letter isn’t clear. In a second letter, dated September 9th, Wakimoto wrote to reiterate the correction request with stronger language and urgency.
UCLA had re-examined its records, he said, and found that the federal grant to CTSI was not used to fund any of Jiang’s work. “Erroneous information” had been given to the inquiry and investigation committees, he wrote.
Wakimoto’s letter said that “after the Federal Register notice was published, another source directly involved with primary documentation, reviewed detailed records of UCLA CTSI funding expenditures, contacted me and provided additional evidence that reflects the true source of funding used to support work for this internally supported proposal.”
“We strongly urge the NIH to rectify the record by publishing a correction in the Federal Register indicating that no NIH funds were used in support of the proposal in which the falsified/fabricated figure related to allegation one appeared,” Wakimoto wrote.
An ORI administrator responded to Wakimoto’s letter on September 12th and said that the agency would issue a correction, which it did on September 16th.
What prompted UCLA to recheck its work – and how the mistake happened in the first place – is still unclear.
Like Retraction Watch? You can make a tax-deductible contribution to support our work, follow us on Twitter, like us on Facebook, add us to your RSS reader, or subscribe to our daily digest. If you find a retraction that’s not in our database, you can let us know here. For comments or feedback, email us at [email protected].
Respondent had to know that there was a substantial risk associated with her actions,” the report said, “because she had extensive experience in this field and understood what she was doing. Thus, the preponderance of the evidence points to the conclusion that these data was knowingly falsified.
This sentence could use some love but great article.
Grant applicant should be responsible for the data submission, cause the applicant is the one
who forms the hypothesis, designs experiments, communicates clearly what he or she wants in the grant proposal, reanalyzes and presents data in the proposal. very speculate that someone is trying to blame this long-time researcher to avoid potential penalties.
LOL, So UCLA got to do an internal investigation and backtracked saying that the falsified data that was in all the other applications just happened to not be in the $57 MILLION grant.