MORGANTOWN, W.Va. — The chancellor for health sciences at West Virginia University says changes will be made after revelations that a former researcher, Dr. Anoop Shankar, fictionalized much of his much-lauded resume.
“We took this investigation very seriously,” Dr. Christopher Colenda said during an appearance on Thursday’s MetroNews “Talkline.”
The problems with Shankar’s resume, detailed in a report NBC News published this week, first started coming to light in late 2012 when Shankar was being considered for an endowed position within WVU’s School of Public Health. Ian Rockett, chair of the promotion and tenure committee at the School of Public Health, initially discovered the discrepancies.
“He (Shankar) presented himself as some kind of genius. He was apparently, according to his CV (curriculum vitae), sort of, the ‘Doogie Howser’ of India, a 21-year old practicing doctor, went to the Harvard of India,” said Nona Aronowitz, who co-authored the NBC story with Tony Dokoupil.
She said those claims turned out to be false. “He was not a Ph.D. A lot of the places that he claimed to be affiliated with, he wasn’t affiliated with. He didn’t really have an M.D. He never wrote a dissertation,” she said.
On Thursday, Colenda said WVU’s Office of Research Integrity and Compliance was developing a series of recommendations for changes to be made following the Shankar revelations and Colenda promised to fully implement those recommendations.
“We do have an academic process in which we take these allegations very seriously,” he said. Colenda maintained that concerns about Shankar, who abruptly resigned during WVU’s investigation, were relayed to the National Institutes for Health and the Centers for Disease Control. “They too did an investigation,” he said.
According to the NBC report, Shankar is now working at Virginia Commonwealth University in Richmond, Va.