Physicist Ranga Dias is no longer employed by the University of Rochester, USA. The departure of the researcher, who has been embroiled in a misconduct scandal relating to studies on superconducting materials, was confirmed in a statement issued by the university, which did not state whether he was fired or if he had left the position through some form of mutual agreement. “Ranga Dias is no longer a University of Rochester employee, nor does he have any research activity connected to the University,” a university spokesperson said. The researcher, who had worked in Rochester since 2017, chose not to comment. In August, the university’s president, psychologist Sarah Mangelsdorf, expressly recommended that institution’s Board of Trustees dismiss the physicist. “Please accept this as my recommendation that the Board of Trustees act to abrogate the contract of Dr. Ranga Dias as a faculty member of the university, to include immediate termination of his employment,” she wrote.
An investigation by a panel of three physicists concluded that the researcher manipulated data in several studies. Two articles published in the journal Nature were retracted due to data inconsistencies, as was a third paper on the electrical properties of a material published by his group in the journal Physical Review Letters. Superconducting materials are capable of conducting electrical currents without energy loss, but the currently known materials only function when cooled to very low temperatures.
In one of the retracted articles, published in Nature in October 2020, Dias claimed that a compound made of carbon, sulfur, and hydrogen had superconducting properties at room temperature—if subjected to a pressure 2.6 million times greater than that of Earth. Suspicions of data manipulation led the university to launch three investigations, all of which cleared the researcher. In March 2023, Dias published another article in Nature—which was retracted eight months later—claiming that a compound of lutetium, hydrogen, and nitrogen is superconducting at room temperature at pressures 100 times lower than the previously discovered compound. A new investigation was demanded by the federal research-funding agency the National Science Foundation, which found evidence of data fabrication. In August 2023, Dias was removed from his lab and prohibited from supervising graduate students. He tried to sue the university for allegedly conducting a biased investigation, but the courts dismissed the lawsuit.
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