Can a University Professor ‘beef-up’ his resume with false details ?

Before you read the story below, about a Professor from the University of California, Santa Cruz, assess your values and expectations by answering the following questions:

  • Would you trust as your Professor someone who use false information in his resume to advance his career?
  • Would you tolerate having such a person as your son’s or your granddaughter’s Professor?
  • Do you find it acceptable that someone who used false credentials in grant applications submitted to federal agencies is continue being funded by tax payer’s money?
  • Would you trust the judgment and motives of a University department chair who ignores evidences showing that a Professor in her department is using false credentials ?
  • What should be the national ranking of a University department that accepted for its graduate program someone with false credentials in his resume, made it possible for this graduate student to submit grant applications with false credentials, had him later hired in the department as a postdoc and research associate for several years, and eventually endorsed him when he applied to faculty positions?

Tough questions, for which most reasonable people would have straightforward answers.

Nicolas Davidenko (cyan text are links to relevant webpages) is currently an assistant Professor in the Psychology department, the University of California, Santa Cruz (UCSC). Davidenko started working at UCSC in the summer of 2012. Prior to that, for six years Davidenko was a graduate student in the psychology department at Stanford University (he graduated at 2006; he was supervised by Prof. Michael Ramscar). After completing his PhD, Davidenko spent six more years as a postdoc and a research associate at the psychology department at Stanford (supervised by Prof. Kalanit Grill-Spector). Based on Davidenko’s curriculum vitae (CV), together with his PhD in psychology, he also completed a master degree in statistics at Stanford (graduated at 2004). Based on his CV, Davidenko did his bachelor degree at Harvard University (1995-1998), where he graduated with honor.

However, Davidenko’s apparent impressive achievements are overshadowed by the fact that throughout his academic career he used false information in his CV. Specifically, until May 2015 Davidenko claimed in his CV to be the author/co-author on two scientific manuscripts that do not exist. These are the details of those two papers taken from Davidenko’s CV (page 4, top):

A.  Davidenko, N., Beaumont, J., Davidenko, J.M., and Jalife, J. (1997). Spatio-temporal evolution of spiral wave activity. Biophys. J. 72:2 A370, June 1997.

B.  Beaumont, J., Davidenko, N., Davidenko, J.M., and Jalife, J. (1995). A model study of changes in excitability of ventricular muscle cells with repetitive stimulation. Inhibition, facilitation, and hysteresis. Am. J. Physiol. 268; 37:H1-H14, 1995.

Search the web for those ‘manuscripts’. You will not find any copy of those manuscripts because such manuscripts do not exist. Do not confuse a manuscript title or an abstract with a complete copy of a manuscript in a known journal website. Also do not confuse Davidenko, J.M (Jorge Davidenko) with Nicolas Davidenko. Jorge Davidenko seems to be a physician in SUNY-Upstate Medical University. A manuscript with details similar to those of manuscript A above cannot be found in the Biophysical Journal or any other journal. In manuscript B, Davidenko placed his name instead of someone else name (the second author, D. C. Michaels). In manuscript B Davidenko also made few changes to the manuscript title. Based on Google, the closest match for manuscript B can be found in The American Journal of Physiology :

  • Beaumont, J., Michaels, D. C., Delmar, M., Davidenko, J., & Jalife, J. (1995). A model study of changes in excitability of ventricular muscle cells: inhibition, facilitation, and hysteresis. The American Journal of Physiology, 268(3 Pt 2), H1181.

Again, a manuscript with a title similar to the above, published in 1995 with Nicolas Davidenko as a co-author, as listed in Davidenko’s CV, does not exist.

Until May 2015, these two manuscripts were listed in Davidenko’s CV as Peer-Reviewed Articles (i.e., full length journal manuscripts). Note that this link directs to an archived version of Davidenko’s CV from late 2014, found on the WayBack Machine web archives, by following the links in Davidenko’s old UCSC webpage. The archived webpage pointed by this link is from December 2014, more than two years after Davidenko became a Professor in UCSC. However, the same false information can be found in all earlier versions, to include also in Davidenko’s CV on his old website at Stanford from July 2010 (the latest WayBack Machine archived version of this webpage). This is an earlier version of Davidenko’s CV, from June 2007, from shortly after he started his postdoc position at Stanford. Again, the false information is there as well.

 

Other implication, involving misrepresentations in applications for federal grants

The false information in Davidenko’s CV may served him beyond improving his odds being accepted to top schools. Nicolas Davidenko received several grants and awards. These include two personal federal grants— the National Science Foundation (NSF) Graduate Fellowship, and an NIH-NRSA (National Institute of Health) Postdoctoral Fellowship. His postdoc and research associate positions at Stanford were also funded by the federal NIH R01EY019279 grant. This is a copy of Davidenko’s biosketch (from late 2008; see highlighted text in page 2), with Davidenko’s publication list. This biosketch is a CV formatted for federal grant applications. This PDF copy is archived locally on this website, but you can request a copy of the relevant grant materials from NIH. In this biosketch you can again find the false information about the two non-existent manuscripts described above. That is, Davidenko used a biosketch with false credentials in federal grants applications, that resulted in him and Stanford University receiving a large amount of tax payer money (estimated total > 2.3 millions US dollars).

Davidenko’s salary and research expenses were for a large part covered by the NIH R01EY019279 grant, for a duration of about three years him being employed as a posdoc and research associate at Stanford. However, there are no evidences showing that Davidenko directly contributed to the research projects funded by this grant (the studying of learning and plasticity in the visual cortex). Manuscripts associated with this grant, authored by Davidenko, describe other research topic (face perception). This later research topic was already funded by other grants in Grill-Spector’s lab (to include Davidenko’s NIH postdoc fellowship). This raises questions about the motives of Davidenko’s postdoc supervisor, Prof. Kalanit Grill-Spector, to fund Davidenko from this grant. Grill-Spector was the principle investigator on the referred above NIH grant that included Davidenko’s biosketch with the false credentials.

The above exemplify why it may be difficult for a University administration to acknowledge that a Professor or student was using false credentials in his CV— besides the damage to the institution reputation, which is often difficult to quantify, there might be direct legal and financial implications. 

 

An institutional cover-up? Why Davidenko changed his online CV in May 2015?

Interestingly, the current version of Davidenko’s CV, available in his personal UCSC website that was rebuilt during early summer 2015, no longer includes any reference to the two manuscripts described above. This change, however, did not happen because Nicolas Davidenko voluntarily decided to correct his CV. It happened because in early May 2015 the following administrators (and a few others) at Stanford University and UCSC, were informed about the false information in Davidenko’s CV: 

  • Prof. Ian Gotlib, Psychology Department chair, Stanford (2015)
  • Debby Angus, Executive Secretary to the Dean of Social Sciences, Stanford (2015)
  • Rick Moyer, Office of Audit, Compliance and Privacy, Stanford  (2015)
  • Rebecca Flores, Office of Audit, Compliance and Privacy, Stanford (2015)
  • Prof. Heather Bullock, Psychology Department chair, UCSC (2015)
  • Sarah Glommen, Executive Assistant to the Dean of Social Sciences, UCSC (2015)
  • Caitlin Deck, Director of Research Compliance and Integrity, UCSC (2015)
  • Sheryl Vacca, Vice President and Chief Compliance and Audit Officer, UCSC (2015)

Each of the above was addressed separately by mail, early May 2015.

Within a week after the above individuals were informed, Davidenko’s CV  with the false information about the two manuscripts was removed from his UCSC website. However, no significant disciplinary actions were taken against Davidenko, he never stopped mentoring students or teaching classes in UCSC, and his Stanford PhD degree or any of his other degrees were not revoked.  To our knowledge, information delivered to the University administrations was not forwarded by the Universities to grant funding agencies who funded Davidenko.

Importantly, although the references to the two described above non-existing journal ‘manuscripts’ were removed, Davidenko’s current CV still contains other ‘inaccuracies’ (this link directs to the most recent archived webpage of Davidenko, at the time this post was written). Specifically, in his current CV Davidenko lists seven conference proceedings on which he is the first author, and one conference proceedings where he is listed as the second author. Conference proceedings are short peered reviewed papers that provide an in-depth description of the methodology and findings of a scientific research. From Wikipedia: “Proceeding are collection of academic papers published in the context of an academic conference or workshop. They are usually distributed in printed or electronic volumes… The proceedings typically contain the contributions made by researchers at the conference. They are the written record of the work that is presented to fellow researchers.” A conference proceeding is not a conference abstract, which is only a few hundreds words summary of a scientific paper.

According to his current CV (see highlighted text in pages 4 and 5), Davidenko’s published four conference proceedings in the Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society, two in the Annual Meeting of the Society for Neuroscience, one in the Annual Meeting of the Vision Sciences Society and one in the Annual Meeting of the Organization for Human Brain Mapping. Notably, the later conference paper was added to Davidenko’s CV after May 2015. However, except for the Cognitive Science Society, the three other scientific societies do not publish conference proceedings. They publish only abstracts. That is, Davidenko continues ‘beefing up’ his CV.  

Non-existent ‘Peer-Reviewed Conference Proceedings’ (listed in Davidenko’s current CV side to some actual conference proceedings papers). These are, in fact, only abstracts:

  1. Davidenko, N., Weiner, K., Grill-Spector, K. (2013). Broadly tuned face and hand representations in human ventral temporal cortex. Talk presented at 19th Annual Meeting of the Organization for Human Brain Mapping, Seattle, WA.
  2. Davidenko, N., Remus, D., Grill-Spector, K. (2010).  Characterizing face representations in the ventral stream: effects of physical variability and distance from the average face. Talk presented at the 40th Annual Meeting of the Society for Neuroscience.
  3. Davidenko, N., Remus, D., Grill-Spector, K. (2008). Responses in face-selective cortex increase with increased face variability but decrease with increased distance from the mean face. Talk presented at the 38th Annual Meeting of the Society for Neuroscience.
  4. Davidenko, N., Remus, D., Ramscar, M., Grill-Spector, K. (2008). Stronger face-selective responses to typical versus distinctive faces when stimulus variability is controlled. Talk presented at the 8th annual meeting of the Vision Sciences Society in Naples, FL, May 2008.

Are these only ‘small lies’ that do not reflect on Davidenko’s scientific competence?

Would you trust someone who lies to promote his career to ‘play by the rules’ when he executes an experiment or when he handles data? Here we can refer briefly to the known case of Michael J. LaCour, a former political science PhD student at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA). In 2015 LaCour had his high profile Science paper on how canvassers can sway people’s opinions about gay marriage retracted, less than half a year after it was published, and shortly before LaCour started working as an assistant Professor at Princeton University. The retraction came after David Broockman and Joshua Kalla, graduate students at UC Berkeley, together with a Yale University researcher, Peter Aronow, were unable to replicate some aspects of LaCour’s Science study. Potentially relevant to Davidenko’s case, after LaCour’s Science paper was retracted, people started questioning some of LaCour’s previously published research. Importantly, there are even questions about teaching awards that LaCour included in his CV, but were removed after his Science paper was retracted and inquiries were made about his CV.

…Would you trust Davidenko as your Professor?

‘Biffing-up’ a CV is not a victimless act. Being accepted to a prestigious University, in part based on false information, involves stealing a spot from someone more worthy. Inflating credentials in federal grant applications may be considered as an act of fraud and it involves the abuse of tax payer money. Given the limited resources, it also means that funding was prevented from others, more capable scientists. Getting a faculty position while having an academic career that is based on lies comes on the expense of more worthy candidates who applied for that position. Finlay, a chronically dishonest individual can be toxic in any organization, moreover in the academia— The cover up or tolerance of a misconduct by some key University personnel is likely to create substantial tension and even conflicts within the institute, as many of the other institute affiliates are likely to be uncomfortable with such behavior being tolerated. In an organization that value or even only tolerate dishonest individuals, honest people suffer most.

Does Nicolas Davidenko represents the culture of the psychology departments at Stanford? Does he represents the culture of UCSC? Or is he just a ‘bad apple’? We could speculate on how other incidents that took place at the Stanford Psychology department, while Davidenko was affiliated to that department, may be related to how Davidenko’s case has been handled. We could also speculate as for why the UCSC administration took no significant action after they were informed about the false information in Davidenko’s CV. However, for now we will only mention Steve Gruenert and Todd Whitaker view of organization culture: “The culture of any organization is shaped by the worst behavior its leaders are willing to tolerate.”

Notably, the graduate program of the Stanford psychology department is ranked #1 in the United States, and it has been holding to this position for many years. If a graduate student in this department can establish an academic carrier while bluntly cheating, what does it implies about all the rest? If leading Universities disregard the core values of higher education and of the scientific community, how long it would be before no one respects those values? Why should any competent and decent graduate student work hard if her University administration value her achievements as equal to, or even as inferior from, the false ‘achievements’ of her dishonest colleagues? What moral justification academics have when they criticize the current post-truth political administration, and its disrespect for science, if they seem to tolerate blunt dishonesty in their institutes?

 

In addition to the administrators listed above, questions regarding institutional and departmental norms and policies that may affected actions taken (or not taken) against Davidenko’s should be, perhaps, addressed to :

 

Copies of Davidenko’s CV archived in this website (with false information highlighted):

 

Leave a comment