Lydia Lee Sohn is a professor of mechanical engineering and bio-engineering at the University of California, Berkeley and the co-founder of Nodexus. In 2002, Sohn and Paul McEuen uncovered figure duplication and fraud in scientific papers on semiconductors written by Jan Hendrik Schön, leading to multiple retractions and concerns over peer-review, which is referred to as the Schön scandal.
Career Sohn credits her parents, who both worked in science-related fields, as an inspiration for pursuing science; her father would bring home objects from the lab like magnesium, which she would then set on fire. Sohn completed her bachelor's degree in chemistry and physics in 1988 and her master's degree in physics in 1990 at Harvard University. She completed her Ph.D. titled "Geometrical Effects in Two-Dimensional Arrays of Josephson Junctions" in 1992, supervised by Michael Tinkham, also at Harvard University. She held a NSF/NATO postdoc at Delft University of Technology in 1993. Sohn worked at AT&T's Bell Labs as a postdoc between 1993 and 1995 in the Semiconductor Physics Research Department where she developed new methods of lithography with an atomic force microscope. In 1995 Sohn was appointed assistant professor of physics at Princeton University. In 2003 Sohn joined UC Berkeley as an assistant professor in the Department of Mechanical Engineering before being appointed associate professor in 2005. Since 2011 Sohn has held the position of faculty assistant to the vice chancellor for research, and in 2015 Sohn was promoted to professor. Sohn held the position of Presidential Chair Fellow at UC Berkeley in 2012–2013 and Baker Fellow between 2013 and 2015. In 2017, it was announced by the American Institute for Medical and Biological Engineering that Sohn would be inducted into its College of Fellows for "Outstanding contributions to engineering design and measurement science in the biomolecular analysis of cell surface receptors." On March 20, 2017, Sohn was formally inducted as a Fellow of the American Institute for Medical and Biological Engineering.
Schön scandal In 2002, a few years after Sohn left Bell Labs, Hendrik Schön joined Bell Labs. Although Schön had acquired "rockstar" status in the research community for work on field-effect transistors, Sohn and her friends felt his data to be "too perfect" with many groups failing to reproduce these potentially Nobel-prize-winning results. The uncovering of Schön's scientific fraud would begin with two researchers, Lynn Loo and Julia Hsu, who noticed a duplication of figures in one of Schön's papers whilst preparing a patent. Around the same time in April 2002, Sohn received a phone call from an informant (who has remained anonymous) asking for Sohn's opinion on two figures, each in separate publications by Schön but both appear to have identical noise. "I just happened to check my voicemail messages in my office and I had a very interesting voicemail message and it said, Lydia, this is your homework, look at these two papers by Hendrik. And by the tone of his voice I knew something very juicy was going on and so I quickly downloaded, these two papers, one from Science and one from Nature." Sohn spotted that the level of noise, which she describes as "squiggles and bumps", was identical even at different temperatures, which cannot be possible, "...[noise] should never overlap one another, noise simply can't reproduce..." Sohn commented. After discussion with others including Paul McEuen, it was decided that Sohn would inform Nature of this discovery as her acquaintances all had pre-print papers under review at Nature at the time. Sohn informed Nature via a phonecall with Karl Ziemelis. Even before an investigation had begun, Sohn and McEuen would discover the same issue in 6 of Schön's papers, with the two remarking that they had become akin to Mulder and Scully from the fictional TV show X-Files, uncovering the extent of Schön's deception."I emailed Nature, and then they contacted Schön with our claims. He replied that it was an innocent mistake and that he would provide the relevant data. But as we all worked through more of his results, everyone discovered more and more instances of what looked to be fraudulent data, and everything snowballed from there. When a colleague got in touch with Hendrik Schön himself, his only comment was “how could that be?” Then we sent him the PowerPoint slides presenting our case. We never heard back from him after that."The investigation by Bell Labs over Schön's work was initiated after being contacted by Sohn and McEuen in May 2002. In September 2002, Bell Labs dismissed Schön after finding him guilty of 16 counts of scientific misconduct out of a total of 25 allegations, including the duplication, falsification and destroying of data. Unfortunately, most of the evidence from Schön's original experiments was damaged or destroyed and further attempts to replicate the transistor behavior have failed. Raw data had been deleted. Upon news of the retraction of 28 of Schön's publications and his firing, Sohn lamented for researchers who had spent time trying to replicate Schön's falsified results, commenting to Nature that she hoped people would learn and move forward from this incident. Commenting on the aftermath of the Schön scandal, Sohn claims that she lost six months of work, also affecting her graduate student at the time. Despite warnings that she would be an outcast from the research community, Sohn attests that she is "first and foremost a scientist, and I felt that someone can't do this to Mother Nature. I felt good knowing that I had done the right thing."
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