CU professor engaged in research misconduct, investigative committee finds
A professor on the University of Colorado’s Anschutz Medical Campus left the institution last year as a university committee finished a report concluding she engaged in research misconduct, a CU spokeswoman said this week.
The incident, which the university hadn’t reported publicly before, was the second time in 2016 that the school found misconduct by a researcher. The university also stripped a Ph.D. from a different researcher last year after discovering he had falsified data in his doctoral thesis.
In the new case, a CU investigative committee concluded that Dr. Almut Grenz altered figures and graphs in 21 instances in a single academic paper. The committee also found the paper contained 16 duplicated images that had been cropped differently to make them appear to be different images.
“Based on the preponderance of the evidence … this was not honest error,” the committee wrote in its final report about the images, “and it is a significant departure from accepted practices of the research community.”
CU spokeswoman Emily Williams said Grenz left the university before the investigative committee finalized its report in October. She declined to say whether Grenz had been fired or left on her own initiative, citing personnel privacy rules. No current contact information for Grenz could be found.
Read the full story at The Denver Post.
This is the University of Colorado Anschutz Medical Campus in Aurora on Tuesday, July 30, 2013. (Photo By Cyrus McCrimmon/The Denver Post ).
This is the University of Colorado Anschutz Medical Campus in Aurora on Tuesday, July 30, 2013. (Photo By Cyrus McCrimmon/The Denver Post ).