Ranga Dias, a superconductivity researcher accused of multiple counts of scientific fraud, no longer works at his institution. Nature reported that the University of Rochester had confirmed that Dias is no longer one of its employees, ‘nor does he have any research activity connected to the university’.
Between 2020 and 2023, Dias’s group published a series of papers on materials that it claimed were high-temperature superconductors. Dias received millions of dollars in research grants on the back of these claims, while a company he founded to commercialise the materials also received multimillion dollar backing from investors.
However, other researchers in the field raised serious concerns about Dias’s papers when they were published. While Dias maintained that the work was valid, several of the team’s papers have now been retracted and an investigation by Rochester concluded that he had committed data fabrication and plagiarism.
According to the report in Nature, while university administrators had recommended firing Dias, Rochester has not confirmed the details of how his employment ended.
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