Rena D’Souza, director of the U.S. National Institute of Dental and Craniofacial Research (NIDCR), has been on paid administrative leave since April during a probe into allegations about her behavior. It is the third action the National Institutes of Health has taken against D’Souza, who was born in India and is the first woman of color to direct an NIH institute. Last year, after two previous suspensions—for 2 days in December 2022 and 2 weeks in late July and early August 2023—D’Souza sued the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), NIH’s parent agency, alleging discrimination on the basis of sex, race, national origin, and skin color.
D’Souza, 69, a dental surgeon with a Ph.D. in pathology and expertise in craniofacial development and genetics, has directed the $520 million NIDCR since 2020. On 15 April, NIH Principal Deputy Director Lawrence Tabak “placed [me] on a paid administrative leave … at short notice and with no details provided other than the broad allegations of retaliation and misconduct,” she told Science in a written statement.
The next day, Tabak emailed all employees at the dental institute informing them, without mentioning D’Souza, that her deputy, Jennifer Webster-Cyriaque, would serve as NIDCR’s acting director “for the immediate future.” Since then, D’Souza’s leave has been extended monthly, most recently through November.
D’Souza’s statement said she is not “aware of the motives underlying this disproportionate and cruel treatment” and that her “efforts to bring clarity and resolution to this matter in a fair and mediated process have been ignored.” The statement says she learned NIH’s probe was completed in early August. She then requested it be sent to HHS’s National Labor and Employee Relations Office for higher level review but has heard no updates since. At the same time, she asked to be returned to her position, she says, but that request was denied.
She declined to elaborate further about the complaints against her or other topics.
NIH would not comment, saying in a statement the agency “does not discuss personnel matters.” An HHS spokesperson also said the department “does not comment on pending litigation or personnel matters.”
D’Souza came to NIH after a long academic career in dental research. She was previously a professor at Baylor College of Dentistry, part of Texas A&M University. In 2013, she was recruited as inaugural dean of the dental school at the University of Utah. One year later, she was removed from that job, although she remained there as a tenured professor until she took the NIDCR job.
At NIH, D’Souza’s unpaid 2022 and 2023 suspensions triggered her lawsuit, filed in September 2023 in U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Maryland. In it she accuses Tabak, then acting NIH director, and Tara Schwetz, then the agency’s acting principal deputy director, of taking “severe disciplinary actions” with the goal of removing her from her position or making her so uncomfortable that she would voluntarily resign. The suspensions, it contends, were based on “ridiculous trumped-up allegations of mistreatment of subordinate employees.”
The lawsuit also describes Tabak allegedly berating D’Souza at a large 17 August 2023 meeting of NIH institute and center directors. It says that, during a presentation on diversity, D’Souza volunteered that researchers of Chinese descent in and outside of NIH were feeling stigmatized and targeted by systematic NIH efforts to have scientists investigated for suspected use of NIH grant money on undisclosed work in China. She said NIH should address their concerns.
Tabak, the lawsuit states, “showed his discriminatory animus toward Plaintiff by yelling and banging his fist on the table screaming that NIH does not target anyone.” (Tabak later that day sent an email addressed to D’Souza and copied to the other NIH directors. Under the subject line “Mea culpa,” it began: “I am sorry for being so emphatic this morning,” before defending NIH’s approach as colorblind.)
According to the lawsuit, the first suspension came after employees reported 11 inappropriate statements D’Souza allegedly made to subordinates, some using race as a descriptive term. But, “Dr. D’Souza did so in the context of conversations about racial diversity and inclusion at NIH, which as director of NIDCR, is one of her responsibilities to foster and promote,” it states.
The lawsuit also disputes another allegation, of allegedly inappropriate statements concerning two employees’ personal lives. These “were not derogatory or mean-spirited, and were made in course of conversation, initiated by the subordinates, where the subordinate volunteered personal information far beyond that which was appropriate in the workplace,” the lawsuit claims.
A different complaint described in the lawsuit alleges that D’Souza intimidated one of her employees from complaining about her using an NIH or Equal Employment Opportunity (EEO) process outside of D’Souza’s control. This complaint is “overblown [and] frivolous,” the lawsuit says. It arises from “a recalcitrant subordinate” who protested when D’Souza decided to have “a long-time NIH partner organization” conduct a webinar on a key oral health report that NIDCR had recently issued, the lawsuit says.
Tabak, D’Souza’s boss, “completely ignored far more egregious conduct” by a senior white man NIH employee, Robert Eisinger, the lawsuit alleges. (Plaintiffs in sex discrimination suits often try to show they were treated less favorably than a person of another gender under similar conditions.)
The lawsuit says in early 2022, acting NIH Director Tabak hired Eisinger, a virologist who had previously worked for 25 years in NIH’s Office of AIDS Research (OAR), in a senior position that reported to Tabak. It asserts Tabak must have known that in 2019, Eisinger had been found by an EEO judge to have discriminated on the basis of race and acted in retaliation when he fired a Black woman subordinate in OAR who had recently named him in an EEO complaint. (Eisinger is now adviser to Jeanne Marrazzo, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases.)
One D’Souza trainee, postdoctoral fellow Jeremie Oliver Piña, who followed D’Souza, his Ph.D. mentor, from Utah to her NIH lab, says the allegations of retaliation and misconduct “just don’t align with the Rena D’Souza that I know very well. It was a huge shock to me [and] … all of the lab members seem to feel similarly.”
Piña adds that D’Souza “has always treated us—and everyone I have seen her interact with—[with] such generosity, such kindness.” She is “definitely a champion of the underdog.”
But, “There is another side to this story,” says one person who formerly worked at NIDCR and asked not to be named. “Many executive staff left the dental institute unhappy with the way they were treated by Dr. D’Souza. Those involved are not likely to discuss their cases because of confidentiality agreements associated with complaints they filed through NIH’s civil process and the federal [EEO] process.” Seven senior employees have left NIDCR during D’Souza’s tenure.
Efforts to reach Tabak and Schwetz, as well as other current and former NIDCR employees with close knowledge of the complaints against D’Souza, were unsuccessful.
By law, NIH cannot extend employees’ administrative leave indefinitely without informing Congress. The agency was obligated to submit by last week a report to the relevant congressional committees notifying them that D’Souza is on investigative leave, and explaining why. A spokesperson for the House of Representatives Committee on Energy and Commerce, which authorizes NIH, said it had not received a report as of 4 November.
