Ranga Dias's ambitious quest for room-temperature superconductivity has come crashing down.
Following March's expose of his research misconduct scandal, on April 6th, Nature published another extensive piece detailing the official investigation by the University of Rochester into the allegations against him.
This comprehensive 124-page official report reveals that physicist Dias, affiliated with the University of Rochester, is accused of data fabrication, tampering, and plagiarism.
The official inquiry, spanning 10 months and conducted by an independent panel of scientists recruited by the University of Rochester, concluded on February 8th. The investigative team scrutinized 16 allegations against Dias and reached the verdict that in each instance, he likely engaged in academic misconduct.
Dias holds a tenured position at the University of Rochester. Currently, the institution is attempting to terminate his employment before his contract expires in the 2024-2025 academic year.
Ranga Dias. Image source: University of Rochester website
Three Investigations Lead to Dead Ends
The investigation report summarizes Dias' fraudulent behavior throughout his academic career, including two papers on room-temperature superconductivity published in Nature, and another two published in Chemical Communications and Physical Review Letter (PRL). All of these papers have been retracted.
Documents submitted by the University of Rochester to the court reveal that this investigation was conducted at the request of the National Science Foundation (NSF).
The NSF, a major funding agency for academic research in the United States, awarded Dias a Faculty Early Career Development Program (CAREER) grant amounting to $790,000 in 2021.
It's worth noting that this NSF-supported investigation is not the University of Rochester's first inquiry into potential issues in Dias' lab. Between 2021 and 2022, the university conducted three preliminary investigations into Dias' room-temperature superconductor paper published in Nature, all of which ended in Dias' favor.
The first investigation was initiated following a complaint by Jorge Hirsch, a condensed matter theorist at the University of California, San Diego (UCSD). Hirsch alleged discrepancies in the magnetization data crucial to Dias' conclusions about the CSH room-temperature superconductor in the paper.
The University of Rochester consulted three anonymous internal reviewers, and Dias engaged an external reviewer to assess Hirsch's claims. Information in the report indicates that the external reviewer was Maddury Somayazulu, a physicist at Argonne National Laboratory in Illinois. However, Somayazulu had been a co-author on Dias' papers. The investigation concluded on January 19, 2022, stating, "There is no credible evidence to warrant further inquiry into this matter."
The second investigation was initiated in January 2022 by Dirk van der Marel, editor-in-chief of the superconductivity research journal Physica C. Another reviewer handled the case and concluded on April 6 of the same year that no formal investigation was warranted. This work was subsequently reviewed by a second reviewer, whose report indicated a potential conflict of interest. The report suggested that this reviewer was Russell Hemley, a physicist at the University of Illinois at Chicago, who had also collaborated with Dias on several papers, including one on CSH properties.
It's puzzling how such significant conflicts of interest could arise among reviewers.
A spokesperson for Argonne National Laboratory denied Somayazulu's role as a reviewer, but did not respond when asked why the footnote in the investigation referred to "Somayazulu_Review of NSF 2020 (CSH) Paper." Hemley did not clarify whether he served as a reviewer.
Nature's editorial team investigated the CSH paper with input from its independent reviewers, two of whom found evidence suggesting manipulation of magnetization data. When the journal announced the retraction of the CSH paper and responded to another complaint from Hirsch, the University of Rochester initiated a third investigation.
This investigation was handled by the same anonymous reviewer as the second investigation. Although the findings of Nature's investigation were available, the reviewer concluded on October 19, 2022, that any peculiarities in the data could be attributed to its processing and did not require further investigation.
The Net Closes In
In October 2022, James Hamlin, a physicist at the University of Florida, submitted concerns about Dias' work to the NSF.
The University of Rochester convened a committee of three physicists to ensure the credibility of this investigation. They were Marius Millot and Peter Celliers from Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and Marcus Knudson from Sandia National Laboratories.
Nature's news team invited several superconductivity researchers to review this investigation report. Initially, they were concerned about the selection of committee members by the university: these three physicists were experts in shock wave physics rather than superconductivity. Moreover, Millot and Celliers had co-authored a comprehensive review paper earlier this year with Dias among 27 authors.
However, these concerns dissipated once the researchers read the report. Brad Ramshaw, a physicist at Cornell University, stated, "They made a huge sacrifice in time for this, and the entire academic community should be grateful to have colleagues willing to put in so much effort."
The three investigators declined to comment. The committee retained records of their work, including data on computer hard drives, emails, and physical notebooks. They also interviewed 10 individuals involved in the case, including Dias and some of his former students, and held at least 50 discussion meetings.
It's worth noting that the researchers confirmed Dias' fabrication of magnetization data in the CSH paper.
The report indicates that Dias initially fabricated the CSH data and published it. When the data's source came under scrutiny, Dias and his co-author and collaborator, physicist Ashkan Salamat from the University of Nevada, Las Vegas (UNLV), released a set of fabricated raw data. The questions about the discrepancies between raw and published data kept coming, prompting Dias to claim the use of a sophisticated data processing method on the published data, shifting critics' focus to the data processing technique rather than the raw data itself, providing a "seemingly reasonable facade."
The Truth Revealed
Investigations revealed that Dias had repeatedly promised to provide raw data but never followed through. In response to the investigation findings, he wrote, "The absence of certain raw data files does not imply their nonexistence, nor does it imply any misconduct on my part."
Dias intentionally misled team members and collaborators on data sources. Reports showed he told his partners at UNLV that measurements were conducted at the University of Rochester, then told researchers at the University of Rochester that measurements were done at UNLV.
Dias also lied to journals. A paper retracted by PRL—a study on the electrical properties of manganese disulfide (MnS2)—was flagged by the journal for apparent data fabrication. He provided fabricated data to the journal reviewers instead of the raw data and was recognized by PRL for "deliberately obstructing the review." Investigators commissioned by the University of Rochester confirmed the journal's findings. Dias used resistance data from his doctoral thesis on germanium diselenide for the manganese disulfide study, a material with entirely different properties. When questioned about this, Dias sent the same fabricated data to investigators as he did to PRL.
How did Dias manipulate the data? It's clearest in the investigation findings of the lutetium hydride (LuH) paper. Dias' former students helped the committee find raw data on the lab's hard drive. According to the raw data, Dias frequently selectively omitted data "to conceal unstable drops and jumps in resistance data, the existence of which would undermine claims of superconducting behavior in LuH," the committee wrote.
On August 27, 2022, Sachith Dissanayake, a co-author working with Dias at the University of Rochester at the time, warned Dias that research data had been inappropriately manipulated, but Dias ignored the warning. In response to the investigation report, he claimed that Dissanayake misunderstood the data.
And these manipulated data were crucial for the acceptance of the LuH paper.
Closing Remarks
On December 22, 2023, the committee sent Dias a draft investigation report, which Dias criticized for the committee's expertise and integrity. He claimed that the committee's methods "can sometimes be seen in the realm of conspiracy theories" and "lack strong logical foundations." Dias also claimed that Salamat persuaded his former students to turn against him and wrote to Nature asking for the retraction of the LuH research paper. However, the facts were quite the opposite; Nature's news team had previously reported that it was the students who voluntarily sent letters of complaint and retraction requests.
Dias did not provide the original data requested by the committee in his response. Investigators responded to Dias' accusations in their final report, stating that his explanations for data omissions did not change the committee's reasoning or investigation findings.
In the end, the committee found that Rochester's students and Dissanayake were not the culprits but the victims. The committee could not obtain resources from UNLV to exonerate these researchers, including Salamat, but they believed these individuals were also deceived and found no "substantive evidence of misconduct."
The committee recommended that Dias should not be allowed to continue teaching or conducting publicly or privately funded research. They added, "The evidence uncovered in this investigation indicates that Dias is not trustworthy."
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