Copenhagen City Court has handed Milena Penkowa, a former neuroscientist and professor at the University of Copenhagen, a nine-month suspended sentence after finding her guilty of using forged laboratory rat experiments in her doctoral thesis, which she wrote between 2001 and 2003.
READ MORE: Neuroscientist’s fraud case to be reopened
The court assessed her offence as a serious case of forgery and therefore decided to punish her with a stiff penalty.
Throughout the process, Penkowa had pleaded not guilty. And on Facebook she wrote that it was a “victory” that she had “not been sent to prison”.
Penkowa was only briefly a professor at the university – at the Panum Institute from 2009–2010. The university then suspended her after she was convicted of fraud and embezzlement in 2010, again receiving a suspended sentence, and she later resigned her professorship.