Thread by @ScienceGirl_KJS

Today is #WomeninScienceDay, and my former dept head just asked me if I would be ok being removed as a coauthor from a paper I worked on for more than a year. With the ongoing discussions about academic misconduct and abuse, I feel it's the right time to share my experience.

I haven't spoken about this publicly because there is an investigation ongoing and I haven't wanted to jeopardize it. Also, I'm worried I'll be branded a troublemaker, and I'm embarrassed I ended up in this situation (I know, victim self-blaming).

I am going to be intentionally vague with details because of the investigation, but I hope to one day be able to loudly name the individuals involved so that they can never abuse other ECRs again.

I began a 3-year postdoc appt in 2020. I had a wonderful PhD advisor who I continue to work and publish with, and a dissertation that I love. I enjoyed being a PhD student, and was so stoked to be a postdoc. Within a month of joining my new lab I noticed serious problems:

-the data I needed were not organized/available as I had been told;
-large chunks of raw data were missing (I was only given transformed data);
-elements of the transformed data had been deleted (with a note in the file saying they had been "thrown out")

These data had been generated by a graduate student who was in absentia; they had a conflict with the PI and were completing their research remotely. When I brought up these issues to the PI, I was tasked with recovering the raw data from the student.

As I began to try to recover the data, I was told by the student that the raw data had been lost and/or deleted. The PI repeatedly brushed off my concerns about this, saying they had no probs w/using the transformed data. However, there were lab no notebooks or explanations

for how the data had been transformed. Furthermore, the provenance information needed to contextualize the data was never recorded and/or was lost. So I was asked to analyze contextless data with missing pieces. When I raised concerns about this, I was

repeatedly gaslit: the PI told me that knowing where a sample came from (location and/or timeframe) was not important, that I didn't know what I was doing, and that I needed to trust them b/c they had my best interest in mind.

During this time I had also been tasked with mentoring several students on project design, implementation, and manuscript preparation. And I was also designing my own lines of research to conduct during the postdoc appt.

My concerns and my expertise were repeatedly ignored, and I was becoming increasingly upset/discouraged with the situation. I felt that I had to stay because (1) I had a job during the pandemic and I was lucky, and (2) and that I owed the PI at least 2 years of the 3 year appt.

Things hit a breaking pt about 10 months into the appt. I wrote an abstract for a big upcoming conference, but when I sent it to the coauthors I received an angry email back from one. The data I had been given to use had been collected from samples

for which that analysis had been expressly forbidden. I reached out to my PI, who *laughed* at how angry the coauthor was, and said they were only angry because our lab had done the analysis before they had. I wrote an email back to the coauthor, took responsibility for the

situation and apologized (for myself - that's important later). In our lab meeting the next day, the first words the PI said to me were "there's our troublemaker!" I suggested we should not use the data from that lender's samples while we smoothed things over with them.

Within 24 hours of suggesting that, students in the lab started telling me that they had been told to remove me as a coauthor from their conference abstracts. Over that weekend, three students were told to take me off/asked for justification why I was included.

I began looking into previous papers coming out of the lab, and found they published previous papers using these data from these lenders. But they did not include the lenders as coauthors, mention them in the acknowledgements, and they obscured where the samples came

from so that they could not be traced to the lender unless you knew the PI's internal identification system. I also found that in a paper they published in Big Fancy Journal, they used the data with missing pieces I mentioned before. How did they account for the

missing pieces? They duplicated the data from the previous data entries (e.g., copied data from the previous five cells into the missing five cells), very à la #SpiderGate. Over the weekend I reached out to the uni HR, the dept. grad program director, and a very

trusted and valued member of my #IsotopeFamily (who I won't name to respect their privacy in case they don't want to be dragged into this). On Monday, the PI emailed me to "meet up for coffee." In this meeting, they threatened me and my career.

They told me I needed to shut my mouth, stop causing trouble, and get on board. They told me they weren't going anywhere and I was the only one who could go somewhere. They told me I didn't see the full picture and I needed to trust them.

They told me I embarrassed the lab when I apologized to the abstract coauthor; when I said I took the blame and apologized for me they told me that was wrong (to the point I started doubting what I had written). They told me I am too nice, that I was helping the grad

students too much, that a PhD is supposed to be hard, and that if the PI helped the students the way I did that they could have graduated 20 students by now. I left that meeting so demoralized. Thankfully, I had meetings with HR, the GPD, and colleague already scheduled.

Those meetings kept me sane. Those people told me what I had experienced was inexcusable. They encouraged me to file a complaint with the uni, to request to be moved to another lab while looking for a new job. So I did both. Uni investigations are exhausting.

First, there's a preliminary investigation, where I got to tell everything that happened and the uni investigated if the situation warranted investigating. Once they decided it did, then they started the official investigation. I then got to tell the whole thing

again in front of a new set of people. Thankfully, the uni continued to pay me during the preliminary investigation, and then finally moved me to another research lab in another dept. I can't adequately express how helpful it has been to have this space to decompress.

But the process goes on for months, maybe even a year. During this time, the PI is still supervising students, still applying for grants, and still publishing papers. I’ve had to tell the whole thing to HR, Title IX, the preliminary investigation committee, and the formal

Investigation committee, and then had to meet with those groups again to retell it. I’ve written up an account of my time in the lab – it’s 12 pages single spaced, and I know I left out important components but there’s just so much to try to remember. And it keeps going

on and on, which brings us back to why I am being asked to step down as a coauthor on a paper I’ve worked on. The PI has plagiarized one of my published papers in a funded grant proposal (which the investigation committee found and brought to my attention).

They have given the research ideas I was developing to other students for them to pursue; when I reached out to a student I had been working closely with on two papers, the student refused to speak to me about them and said I would have to talk with the PI.

And the PI is now actively hurting students and their research progress if they try to include me as a coauthor on the manuscripts I worked on. One student notified the dept head that the PI is holding back their paper if I am a coauthor, and so the dept head has asked me,

an ECR woman coming out of this situation, to step down from the paper, rather than address the obvious retaliation from the PI. I was told that if I decided to remain on the paper that it would potentially hinder the student’s ability to graduate.

I love the academy and it has so much potential to be beautiful and amazing. But when it is rotten, it is very rotten. It’s terrifying to share this – I worry it will
jeopardize the new job I have lined up, or scare away the people I hope to work with in the next year,

or will brand me as a troublemaker.
I hope to find a way use this situation to fuel my future efforts in academic equity and justice. And I’m sharing it because this is a pervasive problem in academia,and unfortunately if the victims of abuse don’t speak

out then the abuse is swept under the rug and the abusers continue to be empowered to abuse