Category: ori investigations

A former postdoc at the National Cancer Institute faked 15 figures and a movie in grant applications, presentations, a paper, and an unpublished manuscript, according to a federal watchdog.

The finding from the U.S. Office of Research Integrity (ORI) comes more than a year after PLOS Biology retracted a 2016 paper and noted that the National Institutes of Health (NIH) had found that the postdoc, Ritankar Majumdar, committed misconduct and faked data in two figures. 

The same day, the journal republished a revised version without the faked data. The retracted paper has been cited 107 times, 13 of those after it was retracted, according to Clarivate’s Web of Science. The revised paper — which included Majumdar as a first author — has been cited eight times. 

The retraction notice stated that Majumdar agreed with the retraction but that he “disputes the NIH’s finding of misconduct.” 

Continue reading Former NCI postdoc faked data, says federal watchdog

A former researcher at the University of Kentucky committed misconduct in both published papers and grant applications, according to a federal watchdog.

The finding from the Office of Research Integrity (ORI) comes two years after the University of Kentucky announced that it had concluded that the scientist, Stuart Jarrett, had committed misconduct on four papers and two federal grant applications – and demoted his supervisor.

Jarrett, a Wales native who left the school in September 2019, faked data in studies of melanoma and reported it in 28 figures in four papers, one funded NIH grant, and two unfunded NIH grants, according to ORI. “[T]hese acts constitute a significant departure from accepted practices of the relevant research community,” ORI said. 

Continue reading ‘A significant departure’: Former Kentucky researcher faked 28 figures in grant applications and papers, say Feds

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.

Continue reading UCLA veteran researcher faked data in 11 grant applications, per Feds

The director of the Southwest National Primate Research Center at Texas Biomedical Research Institute in San Antonio faked data 10 different times in federal grant applications and a now-retracted paper, according to the U.S. Office of Research Integrity.

The Texas primate center has garnered some attention during the pandemic for taking part in tests of a COVID-19 vaccine and treatment unrelated to the faked data.

Deepak Kaushal, according to his bio, “oversees the SNPRC operations, a more than $40 million NIH-funded national resource for primate research” and “is principal investigator on 15 NIH-funded grants and is co-investigator of 9 other NIH grants.” He “engaged in research misconduct by intentionally, knowingly, and/or recklessly falsifying and fabricating the experimental methodology to demonstrate results obtained under different experimental conditions,” the ORI found.

Continue reading Leading primate researcher admits to faking data in NIH grant applications, paper

A postdoc at New York University’s Grossman School of Medicine who the U.S. Office of Research Integrity found engaged in research misconduct while a postdoc at another institution has been awarded an NIH grant just months after being sanctioned. 

The postdoc, Shuo Chen, didn’t admit or deny the ORI’s findings, but agreed to one year of supervision for any research funded by the U.S. Public Health Service, which includes the NIH, as we’ve previously reported. 

That year began on Feb. 28, 2022, and less than four months later Chen was awarded a coveted and competitive K99 “pathway to independence” grant for “Elucidating circuit mechanisms of brain rhythms in the aging brain” on June 15, according to NIH RePORTER. The $135,945 grant is from the National Institute on Aging. 

Chen is listed as a postdoc on the lab website of NYU School of Medicine neuroscientist Zhe Sage Chen (no relation), and also appears in a 2021 photo of members of György Buzsáki’s NYU lab. The grant abstract mentions training in the labs of Zhe Sage Chen, Buzsáki, and Thomas Wisniewski, director of NYU Langone’s Pearl I. Barlow Center for Memory Evaluation and Treatment and its Alzheimer’s Disease Research Center. 

We emailed Shuo Chen for comment but have not heard back. NYU Langone Health media relations sent us this statement after we reached out to Zhe Sage Chen for comment: 

Continue reading NYU postdoc with federal research misconduct settlement awarded NIH grant

A cancer researcher faked data in a grant application, her PhD thesis, and seven published papers, according to the U.S. Office of Research Integrity.

Toni Brand, who earned her PhD from the University of Wisconsin and served as a postdoc at the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF), “engaged in research misconduct by knowingly or recklessly falsifying or fabricating western blot data, by reusing and relabeling data to represent expression of proteins in control experiments measuring the purity of cytoplasmic and nuclear cell fractionation, measurements of proteins of interest, and measurements of the same protein under different experimental conditions or loading controls,” the ORI said in a report published today.

Continue reading Cancer researcher faked data for 24 images in work funded by nine NIH grants: Federal watchdog

A researcher who agreed to a dozen years of supervision for NIH-funded research was fired from the Albert Einstein College of Medicine at the end of 2019, Retraction Watch has learned.

As we reported last week, the U.S. Office of Research Integrity (ORI) found that the researcher, Hui (Herb) Bin Sun, and a colleague, Daniel Leong, faked data in 50 figures in 16 NIH grant applications going back to 2013. The ORI findings are dated March 21, 2022.

A spokesperson told Retraction Watch:

Continue reading Einstein fired researcher in 2019, more than two years before ORI finding

A pair of researchers at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York faked data in 50 figures in 16 NIH grant applications for six years starting in 2013, according to new findings from the U.S. Office of Research Integrity (ORI).

According to the ORI, Daniel Leong, a former lab tech at Einstein,

intentionally, knowingly, or recklessly falsified and/or fabricated Western blot and histological image data for chronic deep tissue conditions including osteoarthritis (OA) and tendinopathy in murine models by reusing image data, with or without manipulating them to conceal their similarities, and falsely relabeling them as data representing different experiments in fifty (50) figures included in sixteen (16) PHS grant applications. In the absence of reliable image data, the figures, quantitative data in associated graphs purportedly derived from those images, statistical analyses, and related text also are false. 

Continue reading Einstein duo faked data in 16 federal grant applications: ORI

A former University of California, Berkeley postdoc in physics “engaged in research misconduct in research reported in a grant application” submitted to the NIH, according to the U.S. Office of Research Integrity.

The postdoc, Shuo Chen, “reused an image of visual cortex neurons to represent fluorescence calcium imaging of hippocampal neurons,” the ORI said. Chen, who was awarded the 2019 Science & PINS Prize for Neuromodulation for this essay published in Science, also used data from a 2018 Nature Neuroscience paper he co-authored while at the RIKEN Institute in Japan “to represent several sessions of two-photon hippocampal calcium imaging of progressive place fields, obtained from multiple mice running on a treadmill in a head-fixed VR set up.”

Continue reading Award-winning Berkeley postdoc faked data, says federal watchdog