About 60 University of Michigan students and community members gathered inside Palmer Commons Friday afternoon to hear from Erika Cheung about her experience at Theranos, a health care startup company whose fraudulent activity was exposed when Cheung leaked reports about the company to authorities and to the Wall Street Journal investigative team in 2015.

Cheung helped reveal Theranos founder Elizabeth Holmes’ false claims about the accuracy of her company’s blood testing technology. Holmes exaggerated the efficacy of the machines Theranos used to test blood samples and also inflated revenue on financial reports. Holmes was charged with fraud in 2018 and convicted in January 2022, before being sentenced to more than 11 years in federal prison.

The event was part of the Rackham Graduate School’s Gupta Professional Ethics series aiming to foster conversations about research ethics among U-M students.

In an interview with The Michigan Daily before the lecture, Laura Schram, director of professional development and engagement at Rackham, said she felt Cheung would be a great candidate to participate in the event series because of her experience working in an unethical research environment and speaking out against it.

“This speaker series enables us at Rackham to broaden our focus in supporting scholars … to build their professional ethics knowledge and skills beyond just thinking about research ethics,” Schram said. “The team just loved the idea of hosting Erika because we...

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