A personal narrative of sexual misconduct in STEM

I am honored to serve on the NIH Advisory Committee to the Director Working Group for Changing the Culture to End Sexual Harassment. This group is tasked with making recommendations for how to change NIH policy and practices to hold perpetrators and institutions accountable for misconduct, provide restorative justice to targets of misconduct, and transform the culture in STEM to eliminate sexual misconduct. As a member of this working group, an advocate for those affected by sexual misconduct, and a survivor myself, I wrote this narrative to provide context regarding how misconduct can be perpetrated at all levels: individual, institutional, and programmatic.

Professional Misconduct

The first time I experienced sexual misconduct in the STEM environment I thought that it was my fault. I had been at a party in our department and drinking alcohol, just like most of the other attendees, but I was a graduate student. I thought that it was my fault for letting my inhibitions go when the party dwindled and I went with the other graduate students back to the campus apartment of my peer who ultimately assaulted me. I was horrified and told other people, and spoke anonymously about it in a blog entry. The assaulter confronted me the next day in my lab. I was mid-dilution series when he blocked the door in our tissue culture room and screamed that I was a “fucking cunt” for sullying his reputation by accusing him of sexual harassment. Up until the assault, he thought I was having a good time. How dare I accuse him when I had been drinking and leading him on? If I didn’t stop “running my mouth,” he was going to make me shut up. He threatened to kill me. At that point other colleagues had noticed and he fled the scene. These colleagues were very concerned, and with their support, I reported it to the department chair, according to the school policy. The department chair, also my assaulter’s PI, assured me that the entire matter was being handled with the utmost seriousness, and he would never be permitted to be around me at any future professional function on campus.

A year later, the department chair kicked him out of his lab for anger issues and shortly afterward moved to a different institution. Immediately, my assaulter began coming to loiter on my floor of the building we worked in. I reported it to campus police, who asked me why I hadn’t reported it a year prior when the original incident occurred. I explained that I had reported it to my department chair, and they said that this did not count since he hadn’t documented it, and as far as they were concerned, that was the same as me not reporting it at all. That was the beginning of my understanding how deeply and profoundly the system would fail me. I followed the school’s policy at the time, and yet I was the one who was blamed for the institutional failures that were unable to protect me and the other women in my department.

My assaulter, now on his third PhD lab because of serial problems with explosive rage, ended up graduating early because the program wanted to be rid of him and there was no departmental or institutional will to expel him or hold him accountable for any of his behavior. I expressed this opinion publicly and he threatened to sue me. An assistant dean got involved and required me to sign a “settlement” in which I agreed not to disparage my own assaulter in exchange for him dropping the lawsuit. I experienced profound depression and seriously considered leaving graduate school within six months of getting my doctorate because I didn’t think I could take any more. My work suffered and I blamed myself for not handling the situation well. My core confidence was permanently shaken. If my institution didn’t believe me enough to take any action whatsoever, how could I possibly believe in myself? My PI supported me, but if he, a tenured professor with an endowed position, couldn’t help me, did I even deserve to be here getting this PhD in the first place?

Institutional Misconduct

I did successfully earn my PhD in 2009 and secured a postdoctoral fellowship at the largest university in my home state, just a short drive from where I grew up. I thought that this would be a fresh start in a new environment. I quickly learned that my new PI behaved erratically. Sometimes he could be charming or kind, but other times he could become enraged with no apparent provocation. I personally witnessed him fire multiple people at lab meetings, sometimes with little provocation. He could be brutally cruel and had a talent for identifying weaknesses and vulnerabilities and using them to humiliate and control his employees. He mocked people for their relationships, their physical appearance, and their competence. The abusive behavior was worse when he was drinking, which was often. I had to enter therapy in order to cope with the stress of working for him. Although in hindsight, much of my PI’s behavior was appalling, the behavior was so openly tolerated that it was normalized. It seemed that, to the university, his behavior was tolerable as long as he kept the indirect costs flowing in.

In 2015, the university quietly began investigating my PI for a complaint of sexual harassment. To my knowledge, nobody in the lab was informed of this until we went in for interviews with the university investigator. The investigator asked about my PI’s behavior but told me that the initiating complaint was demonstrably false. Two days before Christmas, the department chair, accompanied by multiple institutional attorneys, convened an emergency meeting with the lab to announce that my PI was on indefinite administrative leave pending a hearing to begin formal disciplinary processes, and that they would be notifying funding agencies that he could no longer function as PI. However, I was cautioned that I was not allowed to speak to him or anyone else, and would not disclose the specific allegations were against him. Furthermore, while it was apparent that the likely outcome was that we would all lose our jobs, they told us explicitly that they were not able to support us in obtaining new positions because they were not allowed to discuss details of the case. I challenged their authority to enforce confidentiality, as the university is a public institution and cannot tell its employees who they can speak to about something as serious and personal as their livelihoods outside of work. Because nothing about the process was transparent, the only account any of us heard was from the PI himself, who echoed what the university investigator said. He alleged that the university was taking this opportunity to get rid of him while transferring the work to more compliant PIs, preserving the millions in indirect costs that those grants brought into the university. As a result, many of us defended him, which turned out to have lasting consequences for our reputations and livelihoods.

As it turned out, there was quite a bit more to the allegations. In June 2016, a Buzzfeed article by Azeen Ghorayshi came out disclosing the investigation’s findings and the allegations for which he was being disciplined. As the Seattle Times reported, “A University of Washington researcher whose cutting-edge work has put the UW on the forefront of Ebola and flu research has been removed from his lab after two university investigations found he sexually harassed women who worked there and asked employees to solicit a prostitute for him.” According to the investigative report, he had sexually harassed his administrative staff for years, including using university resources to solicit prostitutes and obtain illegal drugs including cocaine and opioids. He hired women as administrators to perform sexual services and personal chores for him and paid lavish salaries well in excess of their qualifications (and exceeding those of some senior scientists in the lab, including myself. He sexually assaulted at least one of these women: “On two occasions, it found, Katze got drunk and was physical with Jane, including once at a conference in 2014. Jane said that Katze ‘put his hands all over her and that he ripped her pants,’ the investigation states.” He used government funds inappropriately, including to finance a relationship with one of the administrators he hired, effectively to act as his girlfriend: “He also bought her gifts, including vacations. From the beginning, the investigator noted, Katze held the job and gifts over Mary’s head, making it clear they were dependent on her continuing to act as his girlfriend.”

Furthermore, there was a long pattern of this behavior. Ghorayshi reported that he had been reprimanded for watching pornography in his office in 2008, a year before I started my postdoc. Numerous complaints of bullying, harassment, and retaliation had been filed over the years, resulting in no meaningful discipline whatsoever. As reported in Buzzfeed, “The university had received at least seven previous complaints about Katze’s behavior, including claims that he was frequently intoxicated in the lab, watched porn on his university computer, belittled his employees, and retaliated against lab members who challenged him. A UW spokesperson said the school dealt with allegations against Katze, over the years, with ‘letters to him, admonishments, etcetera.’ But his employment was never suspended or terminated.” There was also evidence of financial misconduct dating back to 2007, as reported by Ghorayshi: “Katze had been accused of financial improprieties in 2007, when an employee sent an email to the School of Medicine’s dean’s office saying that Katze had approved outrageous fees for work unnecessarily outsourced to a company whose board he sat on. According to the UW spokesperson, the university did not investigate those allegations.” It was clear to me that the university was incentivized by Michael’s lucrative revenue stream of indirect costs to willfully ignore flagrantly fraudulent, illegal behavior for decades.

Unfortunately, this was also clear to the university. Shortly after the Buzzfeed piece came out, I was contacted by the department chair who claimed that I had been overpaid by the university and demanded that I return nearly $10,000 to the department. They threatened to damage my credit and potentially sue me. I had to appeal to the state before they acknowledged that I was not overpaid, attributing it without apology to an accounting error made by payroll. At this time I had already moved on and was in a position financially to fight for my rights, but that was not the case for many other lab members. The most vulnerable members of the lab were the most profoundly harmed. Technicians and support staff, particularly older women who had spent the bulk of their careers with the lab, were not retained. In my opinion, these dedicated employees, who had done nothing wrong other than work for my PI, were effectively abandoned by the institution that they had served for decades and struggled to find new roles. This betrayal is far more painful and traumatic to me than that perpetrated by my PI himself. I confronted the PI after the Buzzfeed piece came out and told him to never contact me again. Unsurprisingly, he was unrepentant and didn’t deign to respond, which I found characteristic of the narcissism cultivated by years of being a “superstar” PI indulged by his institution. I have still not recovered from the trauma inflicted upon his lab by the institution itself, nor have the people who were most harmed. Even after my PI was stripped of tenure and fired in 2017, there has been no outreach from the university or attempts to provide any kind of support or restorative justice. I was tremendously proud of working at the marquis university of my home state, and even now would still love to be part of that community. It breaks my heart that the institution failed all of my colleagues so irrevocably and profoundly, and that there still has been no acknowledgement of the human toll exacted by reducing an entire laboratory of more than 30 people to acceptable collateral damage. This experience taught me that there are many, many ways of being deeply harmed by a harasser without being harassed directly. The most damaging harm — harm done to a community rather than an individual — requires institutional complicity.

Programmatic Misconduct

After the disastrous collapse of the lab where I did my postdoc, I was recruited as non-tenure track faculty to the institution where I went to graduate school. I was able to bring with me funding for ongoing projects I had led in my previous lab to preserve the research. One of these funding sources was a subaward on a large contract with a non-HHS federal funding agency. During a programmatic site visit, I was sexually harassed by a program officer who repeatedly propositioned me and made sexist and racist comments. When I declined his advances, he retaliated by attempting to cancel the multi-million dollar contract. This was not only traumatic for me as the one who endured the behavior itself, but also damaging to over twenty people at two institutions funded by the contract and a tremendous waste of government resources.

Fortunately, I had documented the harassment. The prime institution complained on my behalf, the contract was re-instated, and my harasser was eventually fired. However, this only occurred after the prime institution threatened a lawsuit and I spoke with administrators, deans, and attorneys at both my institution and the prime institution. This resulted in multiple discussions with the general counsel of the funding agency, during which I learned that my harasser had been previously reported for similar behavior on multiple occasions and the agency’s internal investigation determined that he should be fired. I was genuinely surprised that the general counsel of this agency was empathetic and repeatedly assured me that he believed me, which up to this point had been uncommon in my experience with institutional attorneys charged with investigating complaints of misconduct. I was very grateful for his transparency and candor, which empowered me to make decisions about how to proceed without the added stress of possible retaliation for reporting my harassment. However, while I believe that the general counsel’s kind, justice-seeking perspective is essential for conducting such investigations in a victim-centered way, I was disappointed to learn that the agency’s policies were not as compassionate. In order for that agency to proceed with disciplinary action, I had to agree to allow my harasser to cross-examine me in person if he chose to appeal the termination. I am certain that this policy has a deterrent effect for many complainants. Though he did not appeal, I couldn’t help but think how he might not have even been in a position to harass me if meaningful action had been taken for previous complaints about his behavior. Why wasn’t action taken previously? While I do not know the contents of these prior reports, I wonder if he was allowed to remain because those victims didn’t document the behavior thoroughly enough, or were reluctant to put themselves in a position where they could be attacked in person by their abuser. The process for getting a just outcome is extraordinarily difficult when the burden is overwhelmingly placed on victims to document their own abuse, tell the story of the abuse over and over again to officials with no obligation to maintain confidentiality or training in victim advocacy or support, and avail themselves to be confronted by their harasser in person. If not for my unfortunately extensive experience with academic misconduct and retaliation, this outcome may have been different and my harasser might still be in a position to abuse his power with others.

For years, I wondered if I was a magnet for this behavior or if I simply had terrible taste in research environments and mentors. However, after nearly two decades, I’ve realized that I am not uniquely susceptible or particularly unlucky, but that misconduct is so prevalent that such experiences are common to the majority of women, people of color (especially women of color), and/or members of the LGBTQIA community. Furthermore, a major reason why targets of misconduct often feel so alone and helpless is that they are failed by the system at every level: the reporting process is deeply flawed, investigations are not impartial, institutions are not incentivized to center victims or provide restorative justice, and funding agencies do not act decisively to discipline abusers in a way that minimizes collateral damage. Academia remains dominated by a hierarchical culture that protects abusers and values financial and reputational liability over the lives and careers of the abused. I cannot quantify the pain and loss I’ve suffered from the experiences I shared here, nor measure the harm that has been done to my career for speaking up. The costs to the scientific research community as a whole from the millions of other targets are devastatingly vast.

Those of us who have survived misconduct and our allies have been burdened with this long enough. Transforming the way professional misconduct is addressed in biomedical research will not just bring sorely needed justice, parity, and inclusion, but will transform countless lives and careers. The NIH is in a position to show real leadership by acting on the recommendations made by the Advisory Committee to the Director Working Group on Changing the Culture to End Sexual Harassment. I urge NIH leadership to take this opportunity to implement meaningful, revolutionary change.