The conservative news website Alef is reporting that Kamran Daneshjou, the embattled Minister of Science in Ahmadinejad’s government who has faced harsh criticism for some pretty questionable irregularities having to do with his resume, allegedly plagiarized an article he published earlier this year.
Nature has more:
Large chunks of text, figures, and tables in a 2009 paper co-authored by Kamran Daneshjou, Iran’s science minister, are identical to those of a 2002 paper published by South Korean researchers, Nature has learned. Daneshjou served as the head of the interior ministry office which ran the disputed presidential elections in June, which returned Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to power. Daneshjou is also a former governor general of Tehran. The paper by Daneshjou and Majid Shahravi from the department of mechanical engineering at the Iran University of Science and Technology in Tehran is entitled “Analysis of critical ricochet angle using two space discretization methods“, and was published in the journal Engineering with Computers in 2009. In many places the text duplicates verbatim that of an earlier paper: “Ricochet of a tungsten heavy alloy long-rod projectile from deformable steel plates“, published by South Korean scientists in the Journal of Physics D: Applied Physics in 2002. Other sentences in Daneshjou’s paper are identical to those in a paper given by other researchers at a 2003 conference. The scientific credentials of Daneshjou, who was appointed as science minister earlier this month, have been the subject of controversy, with the Los Angeles Times reporting in late August about question marks over his PhD. According to his university webpage at the time, the PhD was awarded by the ‘Manchester Imperial Institute of Science and Technology.’ The webpage this afternoon has changed and says that the PhD was awarded in 1989 after working at Imperial College in London, but that the defence of the thesis was held in Amirkabir University of Technology in Iran.
Many Iranians have criticized Ahmadinejad’s choice of Cabinet appointments, citing a stunning lack of experience for some. Daneshjou was a close ally of Ahmadinejad during the disputed 12 June election, and came under criticism this summer for listing a fictitious university on his resume. He later changed his resume to list a PhD from one of the most prestigious universities in the UK, though the Imperial College of London has no record of his thesis.
During the Parliament’s vote of confidence, one of the members of the Majlis called him “a pin in the grenade” that will explode when the universities open.