A celebrated Harvard honesty professor who researched why people cheat tampered with data in her work — and should be fired, a university probe released this week found.
Francesca Gino, a star behavioral scientist at Harvard Business School whose work has focused on dishonesty, was found to have tweaked observations in four studies so that their findings boosted their hypotheses, according to a nearly 1,300-page report detailing the school’s months-long investigation.
“The committee concludes that Professor Gino has engaged in multiple instances of research misconduct, across all four studies at issue in these allegations,” the report read.
Gino, a star academic who had authored over 140 academic papers and snagged numerous awards, came under fire last year after a trio of behavioral scientists published a series of explosive posts on their blog Data Colada, writing four academic papers published between 2012 and 2020 that the Harvard professor had co-authored “contained fraudulent data.”
The university report detailed that Harvard began a preliminary investigation of Gino’s work in October 2021 after the Data Colada researchers brought their concerns about the papers’ sketchy data to the school.
A full probe was conducted in 2022 and 2023, with three HBS faculty members interviewing Gino and people who worked with her on the papers, in addition to reviewing her data, emails, and papers’ manuscripts. An outside forensics firm also was hired to analyze her studies’ data.
When asked about the issues with her work, Gino told investigators either she or her research assistants may have made errors when handling the data — or someone with “malicious intentions” could have tampered with it, according to the university report.
The investigators rejected both theories and provided findings to HBS Dean Datar in March 2023, advising the school to place her on unpaid leave and begin termination proceedings.
“The Investigation Committee believes that the severity of the research misconduct that Professor Gino has committed calls for appropriately severe institutional action,” the report read.
The investigators also suggested the university audit Gino’s work and request retractions for three of the papers; a fourth paper had already been retracted by the time of their inquiry.
The report is an essential document in a $25 million lawsuit Gino filed in Boston federal court in August against Harvard, Datar, and the Data Colada researchers.
In court filings, Gino claimed reputational damage along with loss of income and career opportunities due to the school’s investigation and decision to place her on administrative leave beginning June 2023, in addition to the Data Colada blogs.
Harvard submitted the report in its defense in the ongoing case, and a federal judge ruled for it to be unsealed on Tuesday over objections from Gino.
A lawyer for Gino said the report demonstrated that “Harvard found no evidence” that Gino modified any data.
“The silver lining is that people can see for themselves that this investigation was a charade,” the lawyer, Andrew Miltenberg, told The Post.
Gino has previously denied any wrongdoing.
Harvard did not respond to a request for comment.
