Academic Career
Ebtekar has served as faculty member at Tarbiat Modares University, which is a post graduate academic center located in Tehran. As an Associate Professor in Immunology, she has taught, supervised and advised PhD and MSc students. According to the Immunology Department websitewww.modares.ac.ir Dr. Ebtekar currently teaches cytokines, viral immunology, HIV vaccines, aging, immunology of the nervous system and psychoneuroimmunology. Scopus has currently filed 39 ISI scientific articles in the field of immunology in her name.In her speech to the Eleventh International Congress of Immunology in Tehran Advancement of Science and Peace (April, 23,2012) she mentioned the detrimental effect of sanctions on the advancement of science in Iran and noted that sanctions should not be directed against nations. Ebtekar is a member of several research board committeesIran National Science Foundation and a reviewer for two internationalISRN Immunology and four national immunology journals.
On October 7, 2008 eTBLAST, a text similarity search engine on MEDLINE database, noted that 85% of a paper published by Masoumeh Ebtekar came from several previously published articles. The paper, on cytokines and air pollution, was published in 2006 in the Iran Journal of Allergy Asthma Immunology (IJAAI) 5 47-56:2006. A couple weeks after the eTBLAST report, Nature magazine covered the story, quoting one of the authors of original papers, (Ian Mudway, a toxicologist at the King's College London) as saying, "the article is a veritable patchwork of other people's work, word for word, grammatical error for grammatical error." Nature also stated that Ebtekar had not replied to its emails. In response, the editor-in-chief of the IJAAI issued a statement saying: "We regret for this duplication that appeared in the journal. We are working with the editors of the JACI journal to find the best solution in this regard." In December 2008 Ebtekar's article was retracted.
The issue received some political and public attention in Iran where Ebtekar issued a statement admitting she had made a mistake and apologizing for it, but including a list of complaints such as eTBLAST's failure to inform her of their finding in advance, the fact that the article was a review article she was invited to write for the Journal, and that more than 76 references were given in the text.
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