Tessier-Lavigne exonerated by review panel, steps down as Stanford president

In a message to the Stanford University community, neuroscientist Marc Tessier-Lavigne simultaneously announced that he would be stepping down as Stanford's president effective Aug. 31, and that the investigational report by a special committee of the university's Board of Trustees determined he did not engage in any fraud or falsification of scientific data. Tessier-Lavigne said he was stepping down because the university “needs a president whose leadership is not hampered by such discussions.”

The review was launched in December following allegations on the crowdsourced platform PubPeer, and in media reports, of research misconduct in studies co-authored by Tessier-Lavigne. The committee reviewed more than 26,000 documents related to five papers for which Tessier-Lavigne was a principal author, and seven for which he was a non-principal contributor, and concluded he did not have knowledge of errors or manipulation of data before the papers were published, adding that he was “was not reckless in failing to identify such manipulation prior to publication.”...