Opinion ID: 2154496
Heading Depth: 1
Heading Rank: 4

Heading: Dr Vossoughi's Unpublished Research

Text: Dr. Vossoughi also sought damages for the loss of his unfinished and unpublished research. Over his long career, he testified, he had worked intermittently on hundreds of discrete research projects. (If I get bored or something doesn't work for few weeks, I quit that, go to something else, come back the next month.) Although he could not describe the research with specificity, Dr. Vossoughi claimed that at least ten such on-going projects were lost when UDC evicted him. He testified that he had performed most of his work on eight of these research projects when he was at Catholic University (though he continued to work on them, on and off, at UDC), and that he had started and worked on the other two projects after he came to UDC. Dr. Vossoughi did not have a specific recollection of how much time he had invested in these research activities over the years. However, based on his prior time commitment to this unpublished data, and his judgment (in light of his past experience applying for and receiving grants) that a typical scientific project would be supported by a research grant of around $200,000, Dr. Vossoughi sought $50,000 in damages for each lost project, or $500,000 in total. Dr. Vossoughi insisted that $50,000 per project was a very, very low estimate. Dr. Conway testified that he had some familiarity with the unpublished research that had been in Dr. Vossoughi's laboratory, because [h]e and I actually were getting ready to publish a couple of papers based on the research that he was doing. And unfortunately we lost that data, so we weren't able [to] publish that research. And in not doing so  it's irreplaceable data. It's just irreplaceable data. It's just  well, it's very difficult to deal with someone destroying irreplaceable data. And obviously we didn't publish because of that. But there was a lot of time and effort that went into it, up to that point. On cross-examination, Dr. Conway elaborated that a lot of the work that [Dr. Vossoughi] was doing wasn't being done by anybody else: [A]t the level that we were doing research together, . . . it was research that no one else was doing. He was doing a lot of experimental work and I was doing the analytical  analytical or constituent modeling. The computer modeling or the mathematics to create the computer modeling. So we had a nice symbiotic relationship going. And so when he lost the data, . . . it was devastating because I was right in the middle of working on these models that seemed to be approaching something that was useful. Dr. Conway believed that Dr. Vossoughi's figure of $50,000 constituted a conservative or reasonable estimate of the value of each lost project. Working at the National Science Foundation, he explained, a ball park figure that we look at when evaluating a budget for a project is about $100,000 per project, plus or minus,. . . depending on the scope of the project. Out of that 100,000, the university will take 50,000 off the top. It's called overhead or indirect cost. . . . So for every tax dollar that you'd like to see going into research, only 50 cents goes to it, the rest goes to the administrators.. . . So $50,000 per self-contained research project is a good ball park figure that most funding agencies use as a guideline. Dr. Saha, who knew Dr. Vossoughi's scientific work well, if not the specifics of the unpublished research that Dr. Vossoughi had lost, described how it takes [a] fair amount of time to complete any research project. He also explained that the loss of unpublished research data injures a scientist's future job prospect[s], which depend on a record of publications. Dr. Saha agreed that Dr. Vossoughi had put a reasonable value on his unpublished research data; in fact, he thought $50,000 per project was on the low side, given that one would expect a scientist to publish perhaps two research papers based on the work that nowadays would be supported by a grant of $200,000 for a two-year period.