Karen Wehner, Ph.D., is the Director of Programming and Policy Initiatives in the Office of Integrity and Responsible Conduct (OIRC) at the University of Maryland, College Park (UMD). In this role, Karen is responsible for developing programming and policies to further foster a culture of integrity and responsible conduct as well as to prevent and appropriately address misconduct (research/scholarly and professional) and detrimental research practices at UMD.

Karen brings experience, gained at the federal and higher education levels, in research and scientific integrity, responsible conduct of research, research misconduct, detrimental research practices, misconduct in the research space, and training/education to this role. She served for five years in the federal government, first as the Director of the Division of Education and Integrity in the US Department of Health and Human Services’ (HHS) Office of Research Integrity and then as the HHS Scientific Integrity Officer. Prior to joining HHS, Karen served as the Associate Director of the Division of Research Integrity at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, (JHU SOM) where she also functioned as Assistant Research Integrity Officer (RIO). In this role, she was responsible for overseeing, developing, and delivering Responsible Conduct of Research (RCR) training for faculty, postdocs, and staff at JHU SOM as well as consulting on and supporting RCR training for graduate students. Karen also functioned as Assistant Research Integrity Officer (RIO), providing comprehensive support for the institution’s response to allegations of research misconduct, and she handled other research integrity matters, such as authorship disputes and professional misconduct occurring in the research space. In addition to her efforts in the research/scientific integrity and research misconduct space, Karen also spent time as an Adjunct Professor at Stevenson University where she taught an introductory biochemistry course and a laboratory course on molecular biology techniques.

Karen earned her Ph.D. in Genetics at Yale University, completed her postdoctoral work at Stanford University School of Medicine, and conducted basic biomedical research at JHU SOM. Karen’s research employed the use of molecular, genetic, biochemical, and informatics techniques and focused on the assembly, regulation, and activity of ribosomes.