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Who is Francesca Gino? Harvard fires star professor with $1 million salary after data fraud allegations
Francesca Gino, a Harvard business professor, was fired for alleged data manipulation to support her honesty hypothesis.
Francesca Gino, a professor of business at Harvard, has been fired for allegedly manipulating data to support her hypothesis on honesty. The famed Ivy League revoked the 47-year-old's tenure in a rare move on Tuesday, nearly four years after she was first accused of data fraud, per Fox News.
Who is Francesca Gino? Harvard professor fired after data fraud allegations
“This is the first time it has occurred in recent decades,” a spokesperson for Harvard said of the professor's tenure being revoked in a statement to the outlet. A leading scholar of behavioural science, Gino published over 140 papers on human behaviour, honesty, and related areas. She earned global recognition for her work with Harvard University's Mind Brain Behavior initiative.
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Before being fired, Gino was among the highest-paid educators, receiving more than $1 million in compensation in 2018 and 2019 at Harvard. But in 2021, her work came under scrutiny by scholars, who accused her of data fraud in a series of posts on the Data Colada website.
“We and a team of anonymous researchers examined a number of studies co-authored by Gino, because we had concerns that they contained fraudulent data,” a post published in 2023 reads. “We discovered evidence of fraud in papers spanning over a decade, including papers published quite recently (in 2020).”
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She has since denied the allegations, filing a lawsuit against the blog writers and Harvard. Gino publicly declared her “innocence” on her website, with a statement that reads, “There is one thing I know for sure: I did not commit academic fraud. I did not manipulate data to produce a particular result. I did not falsify data to bolster any result. I did not commit the offense I am accused of. Period.”
