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  • Date:

    Pichiorri v. Burghes (6th Cir. Dec. 19, 2025)

    Opinion Affirming Defendants’ Motion to Dismiss. Plaintiff, a former research scientist at The Ohio State University sued the Board of Trustees and several university officials alleging violations of due process and equal protection under § 1983 and various state law claims, when, after the plaintiff left the university, a university committee began and completed an investigation finding she had committed research misconduct, and reported their findings to several medical journals and the plaintiff’s employer roughly two years after the conclusion of the investigation. The district court dismissed plaintiff’s complaint, holding that sovereign immunity barred her claims against the Board and university officials in their official capacities, certain claims were time-barred, and all federal claims failed on the merits. The Sixth Circuit affirmed, reasoning that plaintiff’s procedural due process claim failed because she failed to plausibly allege a protected liberty interest, and her alleged harms to future employment opportunities fell short under the stigma-plus test. The court further held that the university’s delay in notifying the plaintiff’s employer and medical journals of its research-misconduct findings did not rise to the level of conscious-shocking conduct required for a due process claim, even if the disclosures were defamatory in nature.

    Topics:

    Constitutional Issues | Due Process | Research | Research Misconduct

  • Date:

    Pesta v. Cleveland State Univ. (6th Cir. Nov. 4, 2025)

    Opinion Affirming Defendant’s Motion for Summary Judgment. Plaintiff-Appellant, a former tenured professor at Cleveland State University, sued the university alleging violation of his First Amendment rights after he was investigated and terminated based on research-misconduct related to a controversial paper he co-authored. The trial court granted the university summary judgment, and the Sixth Circuit affirmed, finding that plaintiff was fired because of misconduct associated with his accessing restricted data from the NIH and not because of the content of his Global Ancestry paper. In reaching this conclusion, the court noted that university officials were “reasonably alarmed by [plaintiff’s] cavalier handling of sensitive genomic data, misleading representations to the NIH about the nature of his research, failure to observe basic conflict-of-interest reporting, and the impact that his actions had on [the university] as a research institution reliant on the NIH.”

    Topics:

    Academic Performance and Misconduct | Constitutional Issues | Employment Separation, RIFs, ERIPs & Retrenchment | Faculty & Staff | First Amendment & Free Speech | Research | Research Misconduct | Students

  • Date:

    Public Health Service Policies on Research Misconduct (Sep. 17, 2024)

    The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services Office of Research Integrity (ORI) published a Final Rule revising the regulations governing Public Health Service Policies on Research Misconduct. The purpose of the Rule is to implement policy changes and respond to technological changes that occurred over the past several years applicable to research misconduct. The Rule establishes requirements for addressing research misconduct in Public Health Services (PHS) funded research, further clarifies ORI’s regulatory oversight responsibility, and outlines the role of PHS-funded organizations in establishing research integrity. The Rule goes into effect January 1, 2025, and all regulatory requirements are applicable beginning on or after January 1, 2026.  

    Topics:

    Contracts | Grants, Contracts, & Sponsored Research | Research | Research Misconduct

  • Date:

    Yoon v. Garg (5th Cir. June 6, 2024)

    Opinion affirming denial of preliminary injunction. Plaintiff, a research scientist at the University of Texas Medical Branch whose research was supported by NIH grants, brought due process claims against multiple University officials after he was disciplined but not terminated for intentionally falsifying and fabricating images in a published journal article. After the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) Office of Research Integrity found that the University’s initial report of research misconduct findings did not fully comply with Public Health Service (PHS) Policies on Research Misconduct, the University created a new committee to restart the investigation that ultimately reached the conclusion that was the basis for the University’s disciplinary actions. The district court denied plaintiff’s motion for preliminary injunction, finding he failed to explain how the officials’ actions interfered with a property interest in the PHS Policies or the University’s policies and procedures. In affirming denial of preliminary injunction, the Fifth Circuit found his complaint that departures from PHS and University procedures resulted in a prolonged investigation was insufficient to identify a protected property interest, particularly as he is still employed by the University in the same lab. It further held that even with the alleged procedural flaws, because he had received notice and responded to the allegations at every step, the University had afforded him constitutionally sufficient process.   

    Topics:

    Research | Research Misconduct

  • Date:

    Croce v. Ohio State Univ. Bd. of Trs. (Ohio App. June 4, 2024)

    Opinion affirming-in-part and reversing-in-part Judgment on the Pleadings.  Plaintiff, a biomedical researcher at The Ohio State University, brought contract claims against the University after an investigation, allegedly sparked by a defamatory newspaper article, cleared him of research misconduct allegations.  The Dean of the College of Medicine nevertheless took non-disciplinary actions against him, including removing him from an endowed chair.  Plaintiff alleged that the University departed from (1) federal standards for addressing research misconduct, (2) its own internal policy to rehabilitate the reputation of researchers who are cleared of research misconduct allegations, and (3) its faculty rules.  The court below granted judgment on the pleadings, finding that (1) the claims based on federal standards were preempted and (2) the remaining claims failed because the University policies leave rehabilitation measures to the discretion of the Vice President of Research and the remaining measures to the discretion of the Dean.  The Court of Appeals of Ohio affirmed that plaintiff’s claims based on federal standards were preempted.  It reversed on the remaining contract claims, noting that the rehabilitation policy stated that the University will “work with” the respondent on such measures and finding that the trial court erred in holding that no set of facts would entitle plaintiff to relief.   

    Topics:

    Contracts | Research | Research Misconduct

  • Date:

    Monge v. Univ. of Pa. (E.D. Pa. May 14, 2024)

    Memorandum denying Defendants’ Motion to Dismiss. Plaintiff, a former anthropology professor and museum curator at the University of Pennsylvania, brought defamation, false light, defamation by implication, and civil aiding and abetting claims against, among others, the University and its former president and provost in the wake of a public controversy surrounding her work with human remains from the 1985 police bombing of the MOVE house in Philadelphia. Plaintiff alleged that a former student, whom she had accused of “unlawful and disturbing” conduct, tried to “cancel” her by falsely reporting to University officials and the media that she had mishandled the remains. After media and professional associations condemned her, the University demoted her and issued a statement describing her actions as “insensitive, unprofessional, and unacceptable.” In permitting her defamation and false light claims to proceed, the court held, first, that plaintiff was a limited purpose public figure, noting her use of the remains in a Coursera course. It then found she had sufficiently pled actual malice, noting her assertions that defendants (1) had previously not acted when she reported the student’s conduct and (2) published the statement without an investigation by the Institutional Review Board. In permitting her defamation by implication claim to proceed, the court found it plausible that the defendants would have known that their statements would hurt her professional reputation. In permitting her civil aiding and abetting claim to proceed, it found her assertions sufficient to allege that the University defendants had acted in concert with the former student.  

    Topics:

    Litigation, Mediation & Arbitration | Research | Research Misconduct | Tort Litigation

  • Date:

    McCarter v. The Univ. of N.C. at Chapel Hill (M.D. N.C. Mar. 15, 2024)

    Memorandum Opinion and Order granting-in-part and denying-in-part Defendants’ Motion for Summary Judgment. Plaintiff, a graduate of the Ph.D. program in Bioinformatics and Computational Biology and former post-doctoral fellow at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill who is African American, brought discrimination, retaliation, and equal protection claims against the University and several former advisors, alleging that they delayed his progress and subsequently plagiarized his work. Of note, though the court granted summary judgment to the University on most of his claims, plaintiff also alleged (1) that his advisors imposed “last minute” requirements on a manuscript he was completing toward fulfillment of the curricular requirement, which they later waived, of submitting work for professional publication and (2) that after he resigned his fellowship, they falsely attributed work contained in his unpublished manuscript to another graduate student. The court granted summary judgment to the defendants regarding the alleged new requirements, citing insufficient evidence that the additional requirements were the result of race-based discrimination. It permitted him to proceed regarding the plagiarism allegation, however, finding that (1) plaintiff’s side-by-side comparison of his manuscript with another student’s dissertation was sufficient to raise a question of plagiarism and (2) evidence of previous allegations against the professors of publishing the work of another student of color without attribution was sufficient to raise a question of pretext.   

    Topics:

    Discrimination, Accommodation, & Diversity | Race and National Origin Discrimination | Research | Research Misconduct

  • Date:

    U.S. Dep.’t of Health and Human Services NPRM on Public Health Service Policies on Research Misconduct (Oct. 6, 2023)

    U.S. Department of Health and Human Services Notice of Proposed Rulemaking (NPRM) on Public Health Service Policies on Research Misconduct. The proposed revisions to the 2005 Final Rule include updates and clarifications to the responsibilities of institutions, new terms and definitions and clarifications to the definition of “plagiarism,” changes to the Office of Research Integrity’s (ORI) procedures, and a streamlined process for appeals of ORI findings. Comments are due on or before December 5, 2023.  

    Topics:

    Research | Research Misconduct

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