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In what is being described as a case of “blatant plagiarism,” a top Canadian scientist and one of his students have issued a retraction for using text and figures that originated with leading United States researchers.

Dongqing Li, who holds a prestigious Canada research chair at the University of Waterloo, and Yasaman Daghighi, an award-winning student nearing completion of her PhD in engineering, have retracted a report about advances in lab-on-a-chip technology.

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The retraction says their report took “unaltered text” from a research paper by scientists at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the University of California, Santa Barbara. Li and Daghighi also failed to provide “appropriate references” for “a few reproduced figures,” it says.

Li and Daghighi, who teach engineering at Waterloo, did not respond to requests for interviews.

University of Waterloo officials, who actively urge their students and staff to stand up for academic integrity, will say nothing about the case involving one of the university’s most celebrated researchers. Li, who is devising hand-held diagnostic devises for use in biomedical and environmental testing, has received more than $2 million in federal science grants and has been promised another $700,000.