Whistleblower sues over retaliation

A physicist has filed a lawsuit against the California Institute of Technology accusing it of retaliating against her and making her working conditions intolerable because she complained about a postdoc in her research team whom she suspected of violating US export laws. Caltech administrators, however, say their only issue with tenured professor Sandra Troian, who has been at Caltech since 2006, concerns the listing of her cat as a co-author of an abstract for a scientific meeting.

Troian’s suspicion concerned Amir Gat, who arrived from Technion – Israel Institute of Technology in March 2010 to join a team at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), which Caltech manages, working on the development of a “micropropulsion electrospray device”. The project had both military and civilian applications and was governed by strict US laws called International Traffic in Arms Regulations (ITAR).

Soon after Gat arrived, Troian recalls that she began “noticing several anomalies including a computer virus attack [that] suggested potential violation of federal export laws”. When Gat admitted that he was sharing information with his adviser in Israel, she responded that his actions violated ITAR laws. Troian informed Caltech and JPL officials and then dismissed Gat in August 2010. According to Troian, Caltech officials admitted that Gat “had made a mistake”.

Two years later, when Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) agents interviewed Troian to discuss Gat’s activities, Caltech officials accused Troian of calling the FBI to the campus. “I tried every which way to protect the Institute and JPL from possible unauthorized transmission of an especially important technology and kept alerting all the proper officials,” she says. “Caltech turned around and blamed the messenger.”

In March 2013, months after Troian filed formal complaints of retaliation and harassment, Caltech officials accused her of research misconduct when she named her cat – M Pucci – rather than another postdoc, Anoosheh Niavaranikheiri, as co-author of an online abstract she had presented at a meeting of the American Physical Society in 2012. Troian provided evidence that the work of Niavaranikheiri, who had left Caltech for personal reasons, contradicted the results described in the abstract, and that she used her cat as a placeholder while seeking a new assistant. Nevertheless, the university instituted what Troian calls a “sham investigation” into the issue.

Troian charges that Caltech denied her more than $1m in research funding and added negative reports to her personnel file

Her suit – filed in Los Angeles County Superior Court in November – calls for a series of judgements against the institute, along with punitive financial damages. The suit, which asserts that Caltech actually punished her for blowing the whistle on Gat, also charges that Caltech officials denied her more than $1m in research funding and added “fictitious negative reports” – including false assertions that three of her postdocs had serious complaints about her – to her personnel file.

Caltech administrators have refused to comment personally on the issue. However, they issued a statement saying that they “vigorously” defend the “meritless” lawsuit. “The institution is confident in its compliance with expert control laws and ITAR, and regularly co-operates with government agencies, including the FBI, as appropriate,” the statement says. “The plaintiff, who was dissatisfied with the outcome of a recent campus investigation into her decision to list her cat as the author of a published abstract and omit recognition of a postdoctoral scholar who performed related research, suffered no retaliation and remains an active faculty member of the institution.”

Gat denies any wrongdoing. “The allegations against me in the complaint are without any factual basis; they are meritless,” he says.