Renowned researcher from the University of Minnesota’s School of Public Health, Rachel Hardeman, announced her resignation amidst plagiarism allegations earlier this week.
A former colleague of Hardeman’s, Brigette Davis, posted on LinkedIn on Monday, accusing her of plagiarizing her dissertation about birth outcomes in a grant submitted to the National Institutes of Health (NIH). Davis said her dissertation was copied word-for-word with a few changes to fit Hardeman’s grant.
“When I say ‘verbatim’ I mean, she performed a find+replace in my document, and replaced all instances of ‘Mike Brown’ with ‘Philando Castile,’ and all instances of ‘St. Louis, Missouri,’ with ‘Minneapolis, Minnesota,’ and submitted this to the NIH as if it were her own,” Davis said in the LinkedIn post.
Hardeman studied health and racial equality and was the director of the Center for Antiracism Research for Health Equity, where she researched health inequities between races. Time Magazine also included her in its list of 100 Most Influential People in 2024.
Davis said in the post that the theft occurred in 2019 but did not learn about it until 2023 when Hardeman invited her to join her team in working on the project she plagiarized from Davis.
Hardeman denied the allegations in a statement to the Minnesota Daily on Wednesday.
“The allegations against me are completely false. I made a mistake in not attributing something – I am human – and when it was brought to my attention, I corrected it immediately,” Hardeman said.
Jake Ricker, a representative from the University, confirmed the complaint against Hardeman in an email to the Minnesota Daily, but could not provide further details because of privacy laws.
Davis said Hardeman invited her to leave her postdoctoral fellowship to work on the project at the University. Upon reading the project proposal, she found the grant to be very similar to her work.
“Imagine my shock and disbelief when reviewing the proposal for my new project at my new job, to find my words, my equations, my grammatical mistakes, even my funny formatting decisions I’d done to add emphasis,” Davis said.