Fresh Concerns Raised About UIC Researcher’s Pediatric Drug Study

New documents reveal that Mani Pavuluri had enrolled her sons as controls in a prematurely halted drug trial, a ProPublica investigation finds.

Written byCatherine Offord

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Emails and other documents recently obtained by ProPublica Illinois have prompted fresh criticism of a famous pediatric psychiatrist whose work violated research rules and put children’s health at risk. University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC) researcher Mani Pavuluri, founder of a clinic to treat children with bipolar disorder, had enrolled her own sons as healthy controls in a clinical study of the therapeutic effects of lithium, ProPublica and The Chronicle of Higher Education report today (July 3).

There are ethical concerns about parents working with their own children in this way, “particularly [in] research that might be quite stressful for a child,” Michael Carome, a former senior official at the US Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) Office for Human Research Protections, tells ProPublica. “At a minimum, the researcher should not have done that without seeking approval from the [university’s institutional review board].”

Pavuluri’s study began in 2009 to ...

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Meet the Author

Catherine Offord
After undergraduate research with spiders at the University of Oxford and graduate research with ants at Princeton University, Catherine left arthropods and academia to become a science journalist. She has worked in various guises at The Scientist since 2016. As Senior Editor, she wrote articles for the online and print publications, and edited the magazine’s Notebook, Careers, and Bio Business sections. She reports on subjects ranging from cellular and molecular biology to research misconduct and science policy. Find more of her work at her website.
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