UCLA report reveals full extent of orthodontic professor misconduct from 2020
An investigation commissioned by UC Los Angeles revealed that three orthodontics professors solicited unauthorized fees from students in 2020, according to the Los Angeles Times.
The review included scores of interviews, reviews of over 300,000 emails and 79,000 other documents and financial records — which revealed influential faculty members had engaged in serious misconduct and led them to leave their positions.
The full report had been suppressed until recently, the LA Times reported. The report reveals allegations of fraud, extortion, violations of conflict of interest laws and misappropriation of public money.
The professors organized a scheme to extort extra fees from students through “obligatory donations,” that if students otherwise did not send would have their studies put in jeopardy. Some of the fees they extorted were referred to as costs of the program, as well.
The three professors led a lawsuit against the LA Times for more than two years to suppress the full report by Hueston Hennigan Law Firm. But in June, an appeals court found the Hueston investigation was “extensive” and that UCLA must reveal the report.
“Plaintiffs make no effort to show that the misconduct alleged was not of a substantial nature,” the court wrote. “And it is plain from the record before us that there were ‘sufficient indicia of reliability’ to support a reasonable conclusion the whistleblower complaint and the Hueston report were well founded.”
The University offered the professors settlements and allowed them to resign in 2020 with no finding of misconduct or formal disciplinary hearings. The three professors are Kang Eric Ting, former chair of the orthodontics section of the dentistry school; Won Moon, program director of the International Residency Program and the Advanced Clinical Training program and Jin Hee Kwak, former junior faculty member.
They have continued to work at other academic institutions with “significant access to and influence on students.”
Kwak started a private practice and is a part-time professor at University of Southern California, and Moon holds professor and adjunct professor positions at Ajou University School of Medicine and Kyung Hee University, both in South Korea, as well as at The Forsyth Institute in Boston.
UC Santa Cruz undergraduates win awards for videos on importance of federal support for science research
Three UC Santa Cruz students took home prizes for a national competition by The Science Coalition, a nonprofit organization dedicated to “sustaining the federal government’s investment in basic scientific research,” according to UCSC’s public relations.
In the 2024 Fund it Forward Student Video Challenge, undergraduate students Jules Rivera and Liza Tsyvinsky, along with ocean sciences doctoral student Mariam Ayad, took second- and third-place awards for their entries in the undergraduate and graduate divisions for the contest.
In 90-second videos, students had to demonstrate the importance of continuing federal funding by highlighting research and technology at their universities. In her film, Ayad explained how she studies coral reefs using remote-sensing technologies to monitor their health.
Tsyvinsky, a chemistry major, studies cancer mutations and highlighted UCSC’s Treehouse Childhood Cancer Initiative in her entry. The initiative uses computational approaches to genetic data to “identify less toxic or more effective treatments.”
“It’s through funding that rising scientists like myself can be supported in learning scientific methods and be introduced to a health issue that needs attention more than ever,” Tsyvinsky said in her video.
Rivera conducts Alzheimer’s-related research with fruit flies. Her video starts with her zooming onto campus on an electric skateboard, followed by footage of redwoods and then Rivera entering a long hallway lined by doors — an attempt to symbolize the progress of scientific discovery.
In total, the UCSC winners received $2,000 in prize awards.
A version of this article appeared on p. 2 of the Jan. 23, 2025 edition of the Daily Nexus.