Superconductivity researcher who committed misconduct exits university

Ranga Dias, once a bright star in the field of superconductivity who has been enmeshed in a public scandal for the past two years, is no longer employed by his university.
Exclusive: official investigation reveals how superconductivity physicist faked blockbuster results
Dias claimed to have discovered superconductors — materials in which electrons flow without any resistance — that could operate at high pressures and ambient temperatures. Previous materials of this type worked only at ultralow temperatures, which are impractical for use in real-world devices. The purported breakthroughs shot Dias to fame and won him millions of dollars in research grants. But after physics sleuths scrutinized the extraordinary results and reported concerns to the journals in which they were published, several of Dias’s papers were retracted. And an investigation by the University of Rochester in New York, where Dias was employed, concluded that he had committed extensive misconduct, including data fabrication.
The Wall Street Journal and Nature’s news team previously reported that university administrators recommended Dias, who did not have tenure, be fired before his contract expired in June 2025. Now, Dias has gone, although the university has declined to clarify whether he was fired. “Ranga Dias is no longer a University of Rochester employee, nor does he have any research activity connected to the University,” a spokesperson said in a statement. Dias did not respond to a request for comment.
The Dias scandal cast a shadow over the field of high-pressure superconductivity, but it particularly affected his former graduate students, who responded to Nature, but requested anonymity because of concerns about their careers. “I am relieved that we finally have closure on this matter, though very disappointed it took so long,” one says. They added that they “await a public statement from the University of Rochester outlining what policies failed” and allowed the controversy to go on for as long as it did.
The Rochester spokesperson says that the university supports students “impacted by the research misconduct of Ranga Dias” and that it is “reviewing and updating our research misconduct policy”.
Dias joined Rochester as a professor in 2017, fresh from a postdoctoral fellowship at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where he claimed to have produced metallic hydrogen. In theory, when hydrogen is compressed to pressures greater than that at Earth’s centre, it should transform from an insulating gas into a superconducting metal. The results were never reproduced, and many scientists doubted them.
Nature retracts controversial superconductivity paper by embattled physicist
At Rochester, Dias turned his eye to other high-pressure superconductors. In October 2020, he published a breakthrough study in Nature1, which claimed that a compound made of carbon, sulfur and hydrogen (CSH) is a superconductor at room temperature. And in March 2023, he published another claim in Nature2, finding that a compound of lutetium, hydrogen and nitrogen is a room-temperature superconductor at pressures 100 times lower than CSH — conditions even more practical for commercial use. (Nature’s news team is editorially independent from its journals team.)
After the first paper was published, Dias’s star rose and Rochester doubled his salary. At the same time, Jorge Hirsch, a theorist at the University of California, San Diego, raised questions that led to three inquiries at the university. None found evidence of misconduct, however. Nature’s journal editors meanwhile retracted the CSH paper after they conscripted independent specialists to review it, and those specialists found evidence of data fabrication.
Data in the 2023 paper also spurred questions in the research community, and Dias’s former graduate students contacted Nature that year with concerns about the validity of the results. The paper was retracted that November.
One sleuth, James Hamlin, a high-pressure physicist at the University of Florida in Gainesville, brought his concerns to the National Science Foundation (NSF), a major funder of US science that had awarded grants to Dias. Ordered to by the NSF, Rochester launched a full misconduct investigation.
Three external investigators commissioned by the university found that Dias more likely than not committed research misconduct in all of the 16 allegations they examined. Public records from the NSF show that an approximately US$800,000 grant awarded by the agency to Dias was suspended as a result of the investigation.
Researchers shared their thoughts about Dias’s departure from Rochester with Nature’s news team. “Did the system work?” says Peter Armitage, a condensed-matter researcher at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland. “Yes, eventually, but many institutions failed us along the way.” He points to Rochester for having missed problems in those early inquiries and to Nature for having published a second paper by Dias after the first retraction.
Nature’s journals team declined to comment.
Dias has insisted on the validity of his superconductivity research on social media, but has published no further evidence supporting it. And independent teams have not managed to replicate the results since Rochester’s investigation results were made public. In June, another of Dias’s papers, this one published by the journal Physical Review Letters and claiming to create another high-temperature, high-pressure superconductor, was retracted3. This brings his total number of retractions to five.
What Dias will do now remains unclear, but according to reporting from Rochester’s Democrat and Chronicle, he continues to work at Unearthly Materials, his Rochester-based company that aims to make new superconductors. In 2022, the company received $15 million in funding from the venture-capital group Plural, based in London. A spokesperson for Plural declined to comment on Dias’s misconduct, and after receiving questions from the Nature news team for this story, references to Dias disappeared from the company’s website.