This got me into a way bigger rabbit hole than I remembered… The person is not officially “fired” since you cannot fire a tenured, distinguished professor and a former department head, but I suspect she was persuaded to leave. The incident is quite wild, I was just a random undergrad hired to do lab tests so I only knew some details.
This is about Dr. Connie Weaver, professor emeritus and former department head at Purdue’s Department of Nutrition Sciences (her ORCiD). She was known for nutrition research where the institution recruits adolescents summer-camp style (similar to a clinical trial), and in 2017 she started to lead a multi-year (lasted one month before it was shut down) study on low-sodium diets in adolescents, Camp DASH. Supposed to be a gold-standard diet study… close to 10 million dollars of NIH money on the line too.
And then things went off the rail. The operation tried to cut a lot of corners: pretty much all of the employees were undergraduates who couldn’t find other things to do for the summer, training was minimal or nonexistent, and the employees-to-camper ratio was very, very low… oddly similar to the recent MrBeast incident where participation oversight seems to be very bad.
This then led to sexual harassment, abuse, etc… one poor girl’s nude was shared online, probably more cases of sexual assault, several adolescents got into serious fights with each other, and from what I’ve heard some of the undergrads who were on supervisory roles were also injured. Several lawsuits were filed, the university stepped in and stopped the study (I just remembered them stop scheduling me to work in July and was wondering what went wrong lol), the issue got elevated to the university president, and more lawsuits…
Obviously tenure means someone should be protected from being terminated at-will like most employment contracts. So the reason I have my suspicion is… Dr. Weaver became a professor emeritus not long after the incident, but is now somehow still publishing work while working from… San Diego State University? Doesn’t seem like someone who retired on their own will to me.
If you are interested in the full detail… here are some news articles on this incident. Exponent is Purdue’s student-run newspaper
This got me into a way bigger rabbit hole than I remembered… The person is not officially “fired” since you cannot fire a tenured, distinguished professor and a former department head, but I suspect she was persuaded to leave. The incident is quite wild, I was just a random undergrad hired to do lab tests so I only knew some details.
This is about Dr. Connie Weaver, professor emeritus and former department head at Purdue’s Department of Nutrition Sciences (her ORCiD). She was known for nutrition research where the institution recruits adolescents summer-camp style (similar to a clinical trial), and in 2017 she started to lead a multi-year (lasted one month before it was shut down) study on low-sodium diets in adolescents, Camp DASH. Supposed to be a gold-standard diet study… close to 10 million dollars of NIH money on the line too.
And then things went off the rail. The operation tried to cut a lot of corners: pretty much all of the employees were undergraduates who couldn’t find other things to do for the summer, training was minimal or nonexistent, and the employees-to-camper ratio was very, very low… oddly similar to the recent MrBeast incident where participation oversight seems to be very bad.
This then led to sexual harassment, abuse, etc… one poor girl’s nude was shared online, probably more cases of sexual assault, several adolescents got into serious fights with each other, and from what I’ve heard some of the undergrads who were on supervisory roles were also injured. Several lawsuits were filed, the university stepped in and stopped the study (I just remembered them stop scheduling me to work in July and was wondering what went wrong lol), the issue got elevated to the university president, and more lawsuits…
Obviously tenure means someone should be protected from being terminated at-will like most employment contracts. So the reason I have my suspicion is… Dr. Weaver became a professor emeritus not long after the incident, but is now somehow still publishing work while working from… San Diego State University? Doesn’t seem like someone who retired on their own will to me.
If you are interested in the full detail… here are some news articles on this incident. Exponent is Purdue’s student-run newspaper