The federal government has declared a University of Puerto Rico faculty member ineligible to receive any federal grants for two years after finding that he “knowingly and intentionally falsified data” in at least 11 experiments while a postdoctoral researcher at Dartmouth College. The National Institutes of Health’s Office of Research Integrity announced its finding in the Federal Register last Tuesday.

The faked data, regarding the effect of anabolic steroids on the electrical activity of rat brain cells, appeared in two figures in a paper in the Journal of Neurophysiology in 2000.

The researcher, Juan Carlos Jorge-Rivera, told The Scientist that his experiments were in error, not falsified, and that the paper is in the process of being retracted. He also said that a Dartmouth committee had cleared him of misconduct. —Lila Guterman