Russia honors chemist who was suspended in Spain 

The Kremlin has awarded an honorary professorship to a chemist who was suspended from a Spanish university for also being affiliated with Russian and Saudi universities.

In 2023, C&EN reported that the University of Córdoba had suspended Rafael Luque for 13 years for holding affiliations with Peoples’ Friendship University of Russia (RUDN) and King Saud University while having a full-time contract with Córdoba.

Luque is now one of a group of foreign researchers cited for making significant contributions to the development of RUDN. He was made an honorary professor at a ceremony at the Kremlin State Palace earlier this year, but this wasn’t reported widely.

Also at the ceremony, Daniel García Rivera, a chemist at the University of Havana, was named the first laureate of the RUDN Prize in Chemistry.

According to the award announcement, Luque leads a group of chemists at RUDN, regularly participates in seminars and master’s degree classes, and organizes conferences at the institution. The announcement notes that Luque published more than 200 scientific papers in which he listed RUDN as an affiliation; 20 of them have garnered a high number of citations.

Luque also conveys a pro-Russia stance, the announcement says. He is currently managing and executing two projects that have received combined funding of 115 million rubles ($1.4 million), it says.

C&EN reached out to Luque for a comment but did not receive a response before this article was published.

According to Luque’s LinkedIn page, he is also directing projects at King Saud University and has active visiting researcher roles in China and Brazil. He was on the analytics company Clarivate’s list of highly cited researchers 5 years in a row. But more than 150 studies coauthored by Luque are being questioned on the postpublication site PubPeer, where researchers discuss papers.

RUDN’s announcement says Luque was fired by the University of Córdoba for refusing to cease contact with the Russian university, But Manuel Fernández Esquinas, a senior scientist at the Spanish National Research Council in Córdoba, says, “I think this is not true.”

According to Esquinas, full professors are seen as public servants in Spain. “We are not allowed to have a second employer who pays us a second salary,” he says. “It’s the same law that is applied to judges or other public servants in working for a ministry.”

Luque previously told C&EN that neither Saudi nor Russian universities paid him beyond funding his research and covering costs for business class travel and luxury hotels.