Peter Chen, Vice President of Research and Corporate Relations of the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH) in Zurich, will resign from his post over data falsification concerns in his research group, ETH announced today.

Chen requested an investigation in January 2009 at the same time that he withdrew one of his organic chemistry group’s spectroscopy publications, which was inconsistent with results from other groups working on the same topic, according to the ETH press release. The outside investigation board could not find a key lab notebook and did find identical background noise in purportedly independent spectra, so it “concluded that some of the data…were falsified.”

The institute has not publicly accused any individuals over the falsification it uncovered, though a second paper was also retracted and a Ph.D. candidate withdrew a dissertation, before retracting the withdrawal. According to ETH President Ralph Eichler, “there is now no legal way of finding out for sure who was responsible for the falsifications.”