As Cornell Finds Him Guilty of Academic Misconduct, Food Researcher Will Retire

Tristan Spinski

Brian Wansink will retire from Cornell University, where he is director of the Food and Brand Lab, after a university investigation found that he had committed academic misconduct. The news, announced on Thursday, occurred a day after the JAMA Network, a group of journals published by the American Medical Association, retracted six of his papers.

According to a statement by the university, the investigation found that Wansink, whose work has attracted wide public attention but has been found to be strewn with errors, had “committed academic misconduct in his research and scholarship, including misreporting of research data, problematic statistical techniques, failure to properly document and preserve research results, and inappropriate authorship.”

In addition, the statement says, Wansink will no longer teach or perform research but will instead be “obligated to spend his time cooperating with the university in its ongoing review of his prior research.”

In an email to The Chronicle, however, Wansink wrote that he would continue to work on new research that’s “focused on trying to make millions of people healthier and happier.” He also wrote that spending time correcting his previous papers “won’t move the ball forward.” He doesn’t think that most of the mistakes that led to the investigation, and now to his retirement, change the substance of his results. What’s more, he believes his studies will be replicated by other labs. “I think they’ve already had the real world impact I had intended them to have,” he wrote.

His departure from Cornell is a steep fall for a researcher who had been considered one of the university’s savviest public ambassadors. Wansink brought in millions in federal grants and was the author of a best-seller, Mindless Eating: Why We Eat More Than We Think (Bantam, 2006). He was a regular guest on TV shows and a pro at dealing with the news media. His attention-grabbing studies, like the one that suggested people ate more food if their plates were larger, were easy to understand and implement.

Plus his work had genuine influence: Wansink’s Smarter Lunchrooms program was used in more than 30,000 schools.

The problems with his research began to come to light after he published a since-deleted blog post in which he gave advice to aspiring academics. That advice appeared to condone questionable research practices. As a result, a number of researchers who make it their business to ferret out flawed science started digging into Wansink’s work. Three of them — Jordan Anaya, Tim van der Zee, and Nick Brown — put out a paper listing more than 150 errors in four papers based on the same data set. They wrote that the data set “contained enough questionable and impossible responses to render it meaningless.”

Tom Bartlett is a senior writer who covers science and other things. Follow him on Twitter @tebartl.