USC professor and scientist Berislav V. Zlokovic was placed on administrative leave, according to an email sent out to physiology and neuroscience faculty by Carolyn Meltzer, dean of the Keck School of Medicine Dean on October 22.
“Dr. Berislav Zlokovic is on leave, and Dr. Steve Kay will be the acting director for the Zilkha Neurogenetic Institute and the Department of Physiology & Neuroscience. We are unable to provide additional information due to the confidential nature of personnel matters,” the university said in a statement to Annenberg Media.
The decision to place Zlokovic on leave comes nearly a year after a group of whistleblowers submitted a report to the National Institutes of Health that accused Zlokovic of manipulating dozens of research papers and questioned the safety of an experimental stroke treatment carried out by ZZ Biotech, which he co-founded.
After the allegations surfaced, three of Zlokovic’s research projects have been retracted from the journals in which they were published and eight more have been issued for corrections or flagged as “expressions of concern” out of hundreds of published works over his career.
Zlokovic began his career at USC in 1989, primarily serving as a professor of neurosurgery, physiology and biophysics. After leaving to teach at the University of Rochester Medical Center, Zlokovic returned to USC in 2011 as professor and chair of the department of physiology and biophysics in the Keck School of Medicine.