Apparently, he also attempted to create a fake website to try to cover his tracks, registering the domain on Jan 12 2025, potentially to try to show that Corning was the company he worked with. This drew a WIPO complaint whereby Corning compelled transfer of the domain name:
>It looks eerily similar to the distribution in this [pharma] preprint. This distribution might make sense for drugs, but makes very little intuitive sense for a broad range of materials, with the figure of merit derived directly from the atomic positions in the crystal structure. This is the kind of mistake that someone with no domain expertise in materials science might make.
At a minimum, MIT must disclose publicly, if and how, its faculty PI and admins complied with the review and approval requirements for human research subjects and NSF grant:
"This work was supported by the George and Obie Shultz Fund and the National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship Program under Grant no 2141064.
IRB approval for the survey was granted by MIT's Committee on the Use of Humans as Experimental Subjects under ID E-5842"
https://couhes.mit.edu/policies-procedures/review-and-approv...
I get the sense that no actual grant, review, or approval took place here. As someone else pointed out, the timeline doesn't add up - the review would have had to take place before the author entered the PhD program.
https://www.wipo.int/amc/en/domains/decisions/pdf/2025/d2025...