Student Admits She Did Not Conduct Experiments in Now-Retracted Paper

Earlier this week, Retraction Watch reported on a Princeton student’s decision to retract her own paper from an engineering journal due to “significant methodological errors.” The student, Rishika Porandla, now tells us she never conducted the experiments described in the study.

“The beam experiment described in the paper was a proposed experimental workflow with associated calculated results,” she wrote in an email. “Public confusion led me to recognize and regret that this is not clear in the retracted publication, and I have included detailed clarification in an updated retraction statement to Wiley.”

Porandla’s original article, published in 2024 in Macromolecular Materials and Engineering based on work she did while in high school, claimed to show it was possible to enhance the biodegradation of polyvinyl chloride, or PVC, by mixing it with gold nanoparticles and blasting it with an electron beam.¹

On May 22, Porandla reached out to Retraction Watch by email to share the news of her retraction because she felt it “highlights a broader issue involving student researchers entering the publication space before fully understanding experimental rigor and reproducibility standards.”

She also noted she had faced “significant pressure from mentors to move quickly toward publication before the work had been sufficiently validated.”

The retraction notice published by the journal indicated she had decided to retract the paper after conducting a follow-up study and discovering problems with “the calibration of the electron beam exposure time and the distribution of gold nanoparticles.”

While the original decision to retract the paper brought praise from one of her professors and the journal’s editor-in-chief, it also led to deeper scrutiny of the high-achieving student’s publishing record and a “research-driven college counseling” business she runs to help students gain admission to Ivy League colleges.

Shortly after our original story was published on August 10, commenters on PubPeer began raising doubts about whether the electron beam experiment occurred and pointing out problems with citations and other issues in a handful of other preprints and student publications she had posted online. (Our co-founder Ivan Oransky is a member of the PubPeer Foundation’s board of directors, but has no role in moderation or any other day-to-day operation of the site.)

“What concerns me more is the apparent failure of the ‘adults in the room’ and of the safeguards that are supposed to surround student research: teachers and advisors, mentors, and, where applicable, peer reviewers and editors,” Kevin Patrick, a sleuth who goes by “Actinopolyspora biskrensis” on PubPeer, told us. “The extraordinary pressure surrounding college admissions has created incentives that are worth examining here.”

There’s no question Porandla is an exceptional student. In 2024, when she was a senior in high school in Coppell, Texas, her school posted a video on YouTube of teachers and students gushing about her drive, generosity and intelligence.

The video ends with a statement from Mark Clampin, then the head of the astrophysics division at NASA headquarters, where she participated in five internships during high school. “Rishika is my hope for the future generation of science,” he wrote. “I cannot begin to imagine what discoveries and achievements lay in her future.”

By then, Porandla was hard at work on the Spacetime Archives, a website and outreach program she founded in partnership with the Junior Texas Astronomical Society. She conducted interviews for a video podcast and recruited other former NASA interns and other space nerds to create educational materials, blog posts, and even a student journal, The Physical Scientific Archives, where she served as the editor.

“AI-usage for paper writing, papers without references, or unethical experimental procedures are strictly prohibited,” the journal’s submission guidelines read.

Shruti Joshi, now an engineering student at the University of Texas at Austin, learned about the program in late 2023 as a junior in high school. One day at the Cozby Library and Community Community Commons in Coppell, she stumbled upon Porandla giving an astronomical presentation and sent her a message afterwards.

“She had a program to mentor students to write papers about certain topics,” Joshi said. Porandla matched Joshi with two other students and helped the group conduct a study on black holes using open-source data.

In February 2024, their study appeared in Volume 1, Issue 3 of Porandla’s journal, and it was later uploaded to the SSRN preprint server.²

“This is just a notice that your Spacetime Archives paper has been published on SSRN,” Porandla wrote in an email to her coauthors on July 13, 2024. “Two of you have ‘no affiliation’ next to your names and that is because your schools are not registered with SSRN. Over the next week, I’ll be working on that issue!”

That year, Porandla founded Counseling by Rishika which features nine consultants — several are also coauthors — to provide one-on-one college advising for $950 over five weeks.

These consultants, her website said until recently, have “conducted and published original research in fields spanning medicine, astrophysics, quantum mechanics, and computer science.”

Porandla and her mentees and consultants have shared their wide-ranging work in student journals, conference proceedings, preprint servers, and at least one open access journal published by OMICS International, which has been previously fined for deceptive tactics.^3-5

How many paid for the help is unclear, but the website for her firm says it has advised “more than 100 students.” Joshi said she didn’t pay to work with Porandla.

“My consulting work aims to help students conceptualize and develop projects for middle and high school science fairs and competitions,” Porandla told us.

Her single-author paper in Macromolecular Materials and Engineering, published during her freshman year at Princeton, appears to be her only publication in a widely recognized, peer-reviewed journal.

She previously told us that it represented “countless hours in the lab” and “was part of my identity as a researcher.”

She originally said she decided to withdraw the paper after discovering methodological errors during a class with Princeton professor Andrea DiGiorgio.

DiGiorgio told us she remained confident in Porandla’s integrity but declined to comment on the new concerns beyond a brief statement.

“The beauty of science and scholarship is that they are self-correcting, they have to be, and negative discourse around self-correction only impedes this process and sows fear into future researchers who are faced with this difficult decision,” she wrote in an email.

This article was authored by Brendan Borrell, and it was first published at Retraction Watch.