Scientist’s misleading research data leads to rescinded grant

Postdoctoral fellow has offer withdrawn after results altered

A promising researcher who was set to be hired with a grant from Texas’ taxpayer-funded cancer-fighting agency falsified her data, according to a federal report issued this week.

The University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center rescinded the job offer to Colleen Skau in July 2017, two months after the Cancer Prevention and Research Institute of Texas approved the proposed recruitment grant; Skau was a postdoctoral research fellow at the National Institutes of Health at the time.

“After being notified the NIH was reviewing the research for possible misconduct and prior to any hire, UT Southwestern withdrew its offer,” Russell Rian, the school’s director of communications, said in a statement.

Skau altered results and figures in one study published in the journal of the National Academy of Sciences in 2015 and in another study published in the journal Cell in 2016, said the U.S. Office for Research Integrity, an NIH office.

Skau was one of eight firsttime, tenure-track faculty members to be brought to Texas under the May 2017 awards approved by CPRIT, the $3 billion state initiative that funds research and prevention projects and institutions’ efforts to lure both established and promising young scientists.

Such grants provide each of the awarded institutions $2 million over five years for the grant recipient’s lab. The money cannot be used to pay the recipient’s salary.

It is not uncommon for CPRIT recruitment grants never to be enacted. The agency publicly announces such awards after its governing board approves them, but they don’t become final until the institution makes an offer and it is accepted. On occasion, such offers are turned down.

CPRIT spokesman Chris Cutrone said that had Skau’s misconduct been discovered after she was on UT Southwestern’s staff, the agency’s award contract would have allowed it to terminate the grant for fraud and seek repayment of any grant funds.

Skau, whose research focuses on what causes melanoma cells to spread, “intentionally, knowingly, or recklessly” omitted data, overstated numbers and falsified measurements, ORI wrote in its report. Skau, currently manager of research programs at the American Urogynecologic Society, must have her research supervised for three years as part of the ORI agreement.

CPRIT has been quietly awarding grant money in recent