Influential U of M public health professor resigns amid plagiarism allegations
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A nationally known public health researcher is leaving her job next month at the University of Minnesota amid accusations of plagiarism.
Rachel Hardeman’s last day will be May 14, according to an email sent to faculty by School of Public Health Dean Melinda Pettigrew on Monday. The email did not state a reason for Hardeman’s departure, and a spokesperson for the university said the U would not elaborate further.
The announcement came four days after a former protégé and colleague posted on LinkedIn that Hardeman poached her work and passed it off as her own.
“When I say ‘verbatim’ I mean, she performed a find+replace in my document, and replaced all instances of ‘Mike Brown’ with ‘Philando Castile,’ and all instances of ‘St. Louis, Missouri’ with ‘Minneapolis, Minnesota,’ and submitted this to the NIH as if it were her own,” wrote Brigette Davis, now a social epidemiologist at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis.
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Davis had been studying how socio-political conflict affected birth outcomes in Missouri following the 2014 police killing of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Mo. Davis alleged that Hardeman lifted key portions of her dissertation prospectus and used them in a 2019 grant submission to the National Institutes of Health, which Hardeman eventually received.
‘I made a mistake’
Hardeman is well known for studying how structural racism can affect maternal and infant health outcomes among mothers and children of color.
But Hardeman’s research would catapult her to prominence following the murder of George Floyd in 2020. She’s appeared on MPR News several times in the years that followed. In 2021, Blue Cross and Blue Shield of Minnesota awarded her $5 million to found the Center for Antiracism Research for Health Equity at the University of Minnesota. And last year, Time Magazine named her one of the 100 most influential people in the world.
In a statement, Hardeman calls the allegations “completely false.”
“I made a mistake in not attributing something. I am human and when it was brought to my attention, I corrected it immediately. In addition, the University of Minnesota has reviewed the allegations and has found that I did not violate the school’s policy.”
Claire Kamp Dush, who served as interim director of the Center for Antiracism Research for Health Equity when Hardeman took a leave of absence in 2024, does not believe what Hardeman did was an “innocent mistake.”
“There’s no way that any part of this is an innocent mistake. It’s one of the sloppiest cases of plagiarism. Like, I just can’t imagine being this sloppy,” she said.
Kamp Dush said that when she heard Davis’ allegations, she immediately filed a formal complaint against Hardeman.
But Kamp Dush said she never received a direct response from administrators. About two months after the complaint was filed, a university database showed that the complaint had been reviewed and any findings of non-compliance, if there were any, had been addressed by the University.
Prior complaint in 2023
It wasn’t the first time the U had been made aware of the allegations. Administrators received an anonymous complaint not filed by Davis in late 2023.
Though the alleged plagiarism would have occurred in 2019, Davis said she didn’t find out about it until Hardeman convinced her to leave her postdoctoral appointment at another school to come work with her at the U in 2022. At the time, Davis said she admired Hardeman.
“I just felt like we were kindred spirits,” she told MPR News.
Then Davis was pulled in to work on the research funded by the NIH grant allegedly built on her writing.
“I noticed my equations. And I thought, ‘Man, those look like my equations,’” she said. “The more I was reading into it, the more I’m like, “These are my actual words.’ The first time was disbelief. The second time was just heartbreak.”
Davis said she confronted Hardeman in early 2023. In an email she provided to MPR News, Hardeman told Davis she “f’d up.”
Davis also provided the university’s response to the anonymous complaint. In it, an investigator at the Office for the Vice President for Research said that Hardeman’s actions were an “honest error.”
Now, nearly two years later, Hardeman said she is stepping away from her role on her own accord.
“This is not a goodbye, but a continuation,” she wrote to colleagues this week. “I will carry the lessons, relationships and fierce urgency of this work forward into new spaces.”