A researcher on flu vaccines who forged colleagues’ signatures, asked a nurse to sign a false declaration, and recruited himself into a study under a disguised name has been suspended from practice for four months for research fraud.

Iain Stephenson, honorary consultant physician at the University Hospital of Leicester NHS Trust and a clinical senior lecturer at Leicester University, was the principal investigator in one study, an open label study, and a co-investigator in a second, known as the “prime boost study.”

Dr Stephenson’s actions, which also included destroying an original log sheet and replacing it …