Category: ori investigations

A psychiatrist studying the development of psychosis faked data from studies of brain imaging in a grant application to the National Institutes of Health, a U.S, government watchdog has found. 

The federal Office of Research Integrity (ORI) announced sanctions against Romina Mizrahi, associate chair of research in McGill University’s department of psychiatry in Montreal, Canada, for “intentionally, knowingly, or recklessly falsifying data” in a grant application to the National Institute of Mental Health. 

Mizrahi submitted the grant application in question, R01 MH118495-01, “Imaging nociceptin receptors in clinical high risk and first episode psychosis,” in February 2018; it does not appear to have been funded. 

According to ORI, Mizrahi:

A U.S. government watchdog for scientific misconduct has floated the possibility of revising some of its regulations, and it wants your thoughts on what should change. 

The Office of Research Integrity recently issued a Request for Information – essentially an email inbox open for suggestions – to help shape its potential revision of the 2005 Public Health Service Policies on Research Misconduct, 42 C.F.R. Part 93 in the federal code. 

These regulations define what “research misconduct” means for work funded by the U.S. Public Health Service – the oft-quoted “falsification, fabrication, and plagiarism” – and establish how the government and research institutions respond to these issues. 

The current regulations replaced rules issued in 1989, the same year the Office of Scientific Integrity in the National Institutes of Health and the Office of Scientific Integrity Review in the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services were created. These two offices were merged into the Office of Research Integrity in 1992. 

Here’s the meat of the request: 

More than a month after a federal watchdog announced that a UCLA scientist had included fake data in a grant application worth more than $50 million, the university says the application didn’t have issues, after all.

In early August, the U.S. Office of Research Integrity (ORI) said that Janina Jiang faked data in eleven grant applications from UCLA. At the time, based on what was available in the ORI’s report, we noted:

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at the National Cancer Institute faked 15 figures and a movie in grant applications, presentations, a paper, and an unpublished manuscript, according to a federal watchdog.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

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. 

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.

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.

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: 

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.