Dealing with Unethical or Illegal Conduct in Higher Education

Investigations into cases of wrongdoing by professors are increasingly in the public eye. But are colleges and universities doing enough to deal with the problem?

Written byAnna Azvolinsky

| 8 min read

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In 2013, Dong-Pyou Han, then an assistant professor of biomedical sciences at Iowa State University, resigned after admitting to tampering with experiments. He had spiked animals’ blood samples with human antibodies to make it appear as if an HIV vaccine he was helping to develop could successfully protect rabbits. After being charged by a federal prosecutor the following year, Han pled guilty to two felony charges of making false statements on a National Institutes of Health (NIH) grant application and follow-up progress report. He was sentenced to 57 months in prison and had to repay $7.2 million of the NIH grant that had been awarded to him for the research.

While other cases of fudging the data might result in a suspension of funds or ...

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Meet the Author

Anna Azvolinsky
Anna Azvolinsky received a PhD in molecular biology in November 2008 from Princeton University. Her graduate research focused on a genome-wide analyses of genomic integrity and DNA replication. She did a one-year post-doctoral fellowship at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in New York City and then left academia to pursue science writing. She has been a freelance science writer since 2012, based in New York City.
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