Category: ori investigations

Former Johns Hopkins postdoc sanctioned by Feds for data fabrication

Johns Hopkins, via Flickr

A former postdoc at Johns Hopkins University has been hit by the U.S. Office of Research Integrity (ORI) with a four-year ban on receiving federal research funding after being found  guilty of misconduct in several studies and her doctoral dissertation. 

We covered problems with several of Deepti Malhotra’s papers in February of 2016. At the time, Hopkins refused to tell us if the issues stemmed from misconduct.  But nearly four years later, the ORI has announced that Deepti Malhotra, while at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health:

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Feds ban ex-Duke lab tech from funding after she faked data linked to 60 NIH grants

The Duke Chapel

Erin Potts-Kant, who lost her job as a researcher at Duke University in 2013 for embezzling more than $25,000 from the institution, has received a rare permanent Federal funding ban from the U.S. Office of Research Integrity (ORI) after investigators concluded that she had used fabricated data in nearly 120 figures. 

The case has been ongoing since 2013. Potts-Kant and a former colleague, William Michael Foster, were named in a 2015 whistleblower lawsuit which alleged that they, with the knowledge of their institution, had used bogus data to collect hundreds of millions of dollars in government grants. Earlier this year, Duke settled the case for $112.5 million, of which nearly $34 million went to the whistleblower, Joseph Thomas.  

According to an ORI finding issued today, investigators determined that Potts-Kant

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Former NCI postdoc faked data from nearly 60 experiments

A former postdoc at the U.S. National Cancer Institute (NCI) made up data for 59 experiments that never happened, according to new findings by the U.S. Office of Research Integrity.

The ORI found that Rahul Agrawal “knowingly, intentionally, and/or recklessly falsified and/or fabricated:”

Continue reading Former NCI postdoc faked data from nearly 60 experiments

U.S. government watchdog names investigative director

A week after news that the U.S. Office of Research Integrity (ORI) would have a new interim director shortly comes news that the agency will also have a new director of its investigative division as of early next month.

Starting August 4, Alexander Runko will be the director of the ORI’s Division of Investigative Oversight (DIO). He is already working at the agency as an investigator.

According to the ORI:

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US government watchdog gets new director

The U.S. Office of Research Integrity (ORI) has a new director.

Elisabeth (Lis) Handley, currently deputy operations director of the Center for Medicaid and Medicare Services (CMS) Center for Program Integrity, will become interim director of the ORI on August 26. (CMS and ORI are both part of the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS)). Wanda Jones, formerly interim director and now deputy director, will remain at the agency in her current role.

Handley, according to an announcement sent to HHS employees,

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Why did all of these retractions take more than three years?

via Flickr

In December 2015, a U.S. government watchdog said a researcher named Girija Dasmahapatra had faked data in 11 papers. Two of those papers were retracted by October 2016.

And then, until this year, nothing happened.

Continue reading Why did all of these retractions take more than three years?

“Our current approaches are not working:” Time to make misconduct investigation reports public, says integrity expert

C. K. Gunsalus

With the 6th World Conference on Research Integrity (WCRI) underway in Hong Kong, C.K. Gunsalus, who has served as a research integrity officer, expert witness in scientific integrity cases, and consultant, argues in Nature this week that universities should “Make reports of research misconduct public.” We asked her a few questions about why she has changed her mind about this issue.

Retraction Watch (RW): We have of course been campaigning for universities to release investigation reports for some time, and have published a number of them following public records requests and reviews of court documents. What led you to this call to make them public?

Continue reading “Our current approaches are not working:” Time to make misconduct investigation reports public, says integrity expert

Former BU prof falsified images, agrees to 5-year funding ban

A former researcher at Boston University (BU) committed research misconduct, according to the U.S. Office of Research Integrity (ORI).

William W. Cruikshank, formerly of BU’s Pulmonary Center,
“engaged in research misconduct by knowingly, intentionally, and/or recklessly falsifying and/or fabricating data” in a paper retracted in 2014, in an earlier version of that paper, in a seminar presentation, and in two grant applications submitted to the National Cancer Institute, the ORI reports.

Cruikshank did so by “copying blot band images from unrelated sources, manipulating to disguise their origin, and combining multiple images to generate new figures to falsely represent results using sixty-four (64) such band images” in 16 figures and related text.

Continue reading Former BU prof falsified images, agrees to 5-year funding ban

Former University of Washington researcher faked data, say Feds

Edward J. Fox, a former faculty member at the University of Washington in Seattle, faked data in a manuscript submitted to Nature and in an NIH grant application, according to new findings from the U.S. Office of Research Integrity (ORI).

Fox, who initially confessed to some of the misconduct when confronted by the university, “neither admits nor denies ORI’s finding of research misconduct related to grant application R01 CA193649-01A1,” the ORI said in an announcement. However, he Continue reading Former University of Washington researcher faked data, say Feds

A university thought its misconduct investigation was complete. Then a PubPeer comment appeared.

When Venkata Sudheer Kumar Ramadugu, then a postdoc at the University of Michigan, admitted to the university on June 28 of last year that he had committed research misconduct in a paper that appeared in Chemical Communications in 2017, he also “attested that he did not manipulate any data in his other four co-authored publications published while at the University of Michigan.”

And so, a few days later, Michael J. Imperiale, the university’s research integrity officer, wrote a letter to the U.S. Office of Research Integrity (ORI) informing them of the findings. On August 2, Ramadagu was terminated from Michigan. And on August 3, Ayyalusamy Ramamoorthy, the head of the lab where Ramadagu had worked, wrote a letter to Chemical Communications requesting retraction of the paper.

While the retraction would not appear until the end of November, and ORI sanctions not announced until the end of December, Michigan’s responsibilities seemed to have been discharged as of early August. But documents obtained by Retraction Watch through a public records request detail how that was not the end of the story. Continue reading A university thought its misconduct investigation was complete. Then a PubPeer comment appeared.