Controversial neuroscientist gets nine-month suspended sentence for lying

Copenhagen City Court finds Milena Penkowa guilty of lying about her experiments

Lucie Rychla

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.

 

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