Former collaborator presenting joint research as his own

Short Answer

No, you should contact Prof Jim and request that he properly acknowledge the source of the work that he is presenting as being your dissertation research.

Longer Answer

You state the work is from your dissertation. You state that Prof Jim was a committee member, meaning he was not your primary advisor. Finally, you claim that Prof Jim is presenting your dissertation work as if it was his own. Let's leave aside how you know this.

First to the case of plagiarism. At its core, this will mean that Prof Jim is giving you absolutely no acknowledgement at all for the work AND that he is claiming explicitly that the work is his. This is plagiarism. What does absolutely mean? It means, not only do you not have any written notice on the presentation, you are not given any verbal acknowledgement during the presentation. Are you certain that Prof Jim does not start or end his talk with a verbal statement such as this: "All of the work that I am showing today was done by Vladhagen who was a graduate student at the time"? Alternatively, are you absolutely certain that Prof Jim is saying something such as this: "To explore this problem, I did this type of study". Absent such evidence, you cannot conclusively prove plagiarism. You can only state that Prof Jim is negligent and thereby potentially engaging in plagiarism.

In summary, your feelings aside, this is NOT a clear instance of plagiarism.

Your case is solely that Prof Jim gives no written acknowledgement anywhere in his written slides for your work. This borders on being dishonest to the extent that Prof Jim was not your primary advisor and the work was your dissertation research. But then, Prof Jim is co-author on a publication. So, Prof Jim does have a right during his presentation to demonstrate the work because it was done in collaboration and is already published as such.

Your case is therefore solely that Prof Jim is taking a negligent approach to acknowledge in writing in his slides that the work is your dissertation research.

At this point, your first approach must be to contact Prof Jim for clarification. You are at an equal footing here as a colleague. You need only state two things.

• I know that you are presenting the research work that we did in collaboration for my dissertation during your interviews.
• I am aware that my contributions to the work are being mis-represented because a written acknowledgment is not given on the slides to state that I was the principal contributor on the work.

You have already contacted Prof Jim by email and he has not responded. What does that mean? You have a responsibility now to contact him by phone or visit him directly. In addition, you might engage your primary dissertation advisor. He or she can apply a counter pressure to Prof Jim to drive the point home further. He or she should also be in the better position to inform the universities as needed when the contacts continue to go unanswered.

You are also within your bounds to ask for an official copy of the written presentation, since it represents work that you did.

Finally, as someone on the other side (responsible to do faculty interviews), I can say that faculty are not oblivious to cases such as this. When we interview, we have a CV that lists publications. We hear an oral presentation. We pay attention to whether the presentation fully acknowledges the records in the CV. When they do not, we ask questions. Specifically, when I hear an oral presentation that does not have a concluding list of students who contributed to the work, my alarm bells immediately start ringing. This is NOT NORMAL! In other words, rather than rushing to contact faculty for what you believe could be true, trust that WE will contact YOU should the case reach that level of seriousness (i.e. indications of plagiarism).

Ask yourself:

• Did Prof Jim have a significant role in the design, planning, or execution of your research?
• Did Prof Jim engage in longer discussions with you on how you will perform the research and/or did he give qualified feedback on your research?
• Did he possibly interact with your (main) supervisor about it and made a significant contribution by this way?

If he did then it is most likely OK to talk about your research as long as he gives sufficient credit to you with phrases like "the student X under my co-supervision did ...". Some professors even make a game out of it putting pictures of their students on the respective slides in their presentations.

More senior professors will not have their "own" research at all as they work fully in research management (getting grants and hiring+supervising people to do the research).

Before you take action (plagiarism is a very serious accusation):

• Investigate if he gave credit to you for your work or not. If he presented it really as his own without credit to you this is certainly not ok. I am just not sure that he would really do this as at his career stage it might even be more beneficial to him to show that a student of his did great work than that he did some work by himself.
• Maybe ask your main supervisor for his opinion before taking action
• Contact Prof Jim directly and ask for his point of view (in friendly words)

If this does not lead to satisfying results for you then you should contact the universities.

One more note on this: To defuse such problematic situations many fields have introduced the concept of first-author (the student who did the actual work listed first) and senior authors (the professors listed last). At least in a journal publication it is then clear who did what.

UPDATE: As the question was now edited and it is stated that Prof Jim is co-author on a paper that presents the research in questions the situation changes: Even if he didnt give you enough credit (which he should have done!) it is not plagiarism and you will have little ground to file a complain.