Uphold the highest ethical standards, ensuring that our work is conducted with integrity, transparency and the utmost regard for truth
Dr. Courtney Griffin never thought of herself as a “science kid.” The child of an attorney and an English professor, she spent countless hours solving puzzles and word problems. “I thought it was leading me toward the humanities,” she says. “It turns out it was leading me toward science.”
In high school in Athens, Georgia, an AP biology class opened her eyes to the joys of laboratory science. But it was a chemistry project that sealed the deal. “The teacher sent us outside to pick up something on school grounds,” remembers Griffin, who chose a bobby pin. When she and her classmates brought their found objects back to the classroom, the teacher gave them what sounded like a straightforward assignment: “Now figure out what’s in it.”
Griffin spent the next six months using various tests to determine the chemical components of the minuscule hairpin. It was, she says, the first time she’d faced a problem in school where even the teacher didn’t know the answer. She loved it. “It was the true scientific method.”
Now OMRF’s vice president of research and the Scott Zarrow Chair in Biomedical Research, Griffin says that method represents the beating heart of biomedical research. It starts with scientists posing a question that hasn’t been answered. Next, they formulate a hypothesis, a proposed answer to that question. And then they test to find out if their theory is, in fact, correct.
Throughout her scientific career – which began at Harvard as an undergraduate, then continued with graduate school at the University of California, San Francisco, a postdoctoral fellowship at the University of North Carolina, and a faculty position at OMRF since 2008 – Griffin says she’s never felt a temptation to force experimental results to fit a preconceived notion. “Science is so much more elegant and clever and gorgeous than anything I could dream up,” she says. “The data we generate are inevitably more interesting than whatever theory we’ve developed.”
As a junior faculty member at OMRF, she was asked to serve on a panel investigating a case of scientific misconduct involving a postdoctoral researcher. The researcher was suspected of altering images in a manuscript submitted to a scientific journal, charges to which he eventually confessed.
Griffin found the young researcher’s behavior “baffling and sad.” OMRF, she says, has always placed a premium on truth, affording her and her fellow scientists the time and resources to get things right. “It’s part of our culture.” The investigation, which led to the termination of the scientist’s employment and a bar on performing future federally funded research, “felt very fair,” says Griffin.
She had a similar feeling several years later, when she once again served on a panel investigating an accusation of scientific misconduct. This time, though, the group reached a different conclusion, finding the situation boiled down to a legitimate dispute between two researchers about methods of data analysis. Again, Griffin lauded the panel’s attention to due process, along with its careful review of the evidence. “We had a room full of scientists grappling with these complicated questions from our own perspectives.”
When OMRF’s longtime research integrity officer retired in 2022, Griffin accepted the role without hesitation. “I’d been here long enough to understand OMRF’s culture and operations, and that made me feel both comfortable and committed to taking it on.” Happily, each of the annual filings she’s since submitted to the federal Office of Research Integrity has been short and to the point: nothing to report.
This past summer, she attended a research integrity officer “boot camp,” where she met dozens of her counterparts from other institutions. It honed her knowledge of regulation and procedure, buttressing her ability to handle any allegation of research misconduct that might arise. She left with a renewed appreciation for OMRF. “I felt lucky to be at a place where we’re not constantly embroiled in these issues,” she says. As the person charged with safeguarding OMRF’s scientific integrity, she’ll do all she can to keep it that way.
