American news agency NBC has just published an explosive report (10 Sep) about former National University of Singapore (NUS) Assistant Professor Dr Anoop Shankar. He allegedly used lies and deceit to obtain a position at West Virginia University (WVU) in the US [Link]. Dr Shankar is an Indian national who used to be an assistant professor with the Department of Community, Occupational and Family Medicine at NUS’s School of Medicine. After his stint with NUS, he joined WVU in 2008. According to NBC, Dr Shankar was said to be a “child genius” who had completed med school in India’s “Harvard” by age 21. He claimed to have earned a doctorate in epidemiology and researched worldwide population diseases. He also said he was a member of the Royal College of Physicians, and had published in dozens of scholarly medical articles. Investigations showed that all the claims were false. The US Immigration Service is said to be conducting its own investigation currently. NUS has reportedly confirmed that Dr Shankar was an assistant professor with the Department of Community, Occupational and Family Medicine at NUS’s Yong Loo Lin School of Medicine from 2005 to 2008, but did not provide further comment. But a check by TRE found that Dr Shankar was already employed by NUS as early as 2004, according to the Yong Loo Lin School of Medicine Research Report 2004 [Link]: According to NBC, several of Dr Shankar’s ex-colleagues in WVU described him as a charming, bright-minded “impostor” who built a career on a “base of lies”. Dr Sarah Knox, one of Dr Shankar’s former colleagues, said that his consistently “clear cut results” are “uncommon” in large studies. She was amazed at how he could rack up dozens of publications a year. “How come my results don’t do that?” she asked. One day she discovered an explanation, NBC reported. A student of hers was trying to determine whether exposure to a certain common chemical had an effect on people. It was a new student, not yet trained in statistics, so Dr Shankar’s personal statistician ran the analyses. And the results were perfect: the chemical was indeed showing a widespread effect. However, she later found out that Dr Shankar had instructed the statistician to control for the effect of gender and ethnicity. She asked the student why and the answer disturbed her: without the controls the effect only registered in white males, she said. White males, Dr Shankar suggested, were not enough of a population to impress the big medical journals. “My jaw dropped to the floor,” recalled Dr Knox. Here was a person so comfortable with deception that he was willing to teach it to students, she thought. When Dr Shankar left, Dr Knox took over his role in the student’s paper and she tried to re-run the analyses. But she could not because Dr Shankar had taken everything with him when he left WVU. While in NUS, Shankar authored and co-authored a number of research publications. For example, in 2006, he published this paper [Link]: The relationship between inflammation, endothelial dysfunction, oxidative stress, microvascular function and chronic kidney disease (CKD), a population-based case-control study – Principal Investigator: Dr Anoop Shankar It is not known what kind of statistical methods Shankar used for all the papers he had authored, co-authored or otherwise been responsible for, in NUS. However, his NUS colleagues seemed to trust him when he was there. The media reported that Associate Professor Koh Woon Puay of Duke-NUS Graduate Medical School was taken aback by the allegations reported by NBC. Prof Koh said she had not found any reason to question his credentials. “Personally, I did not have any reason to suspect at that time that he was not trained in epidemiology or statistics to carry out his research,” said Prof Koh, who stood by the 3 papers they had worked on together. Should NUS, as a matter of prudence, review all the papers Dr Shankar has had a hand in while he was employed there, in light of the serious allegations now levelled against him? tremeritus/2014/09/12/former-nus-prof-exposed-as-a-fraud/
Posted on: Fri, 12 Sep 2014 16:13:09 +0000
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