Dollars for Profs

Dig Into University Researchers' Outside Income and Conflicts of Interest

Published Dec. 6, 2019

This database was last updated in December 2019 and should only be used as a historical snapshot. There may be new or amended records not reflected here.

Financial doc
Filing Type

Conflict of Interest

Institutions must file significant disclosures to the National Institutes of Health if they determine financial relationships could affect the design, conduct or reporting of the NIH-funded research. The NIH provided us with their entire financial conflict of interest database, with filings from 2012 through 2019.

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Sean Fontenot

University of Oregon, Department: Other Basic Sciences

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Disclosed Conflict of Interest with

The Climate Corporation (TCC)

Disclosed Value
Listed Reason
Salary not from the awardee Institution

Dr. Fontenot is a research associate in chemistry and biochemistry at the University of Oregon. He declared receiving salary and consulting fees from The Climate Corporation for consulting related to development of sensors; report writing; formulation of chemicals related to sensor production; and production and testing of sensors and sensor components. The proposal for this sponsored project states the project aims to “demonstrate the feasibility of incorporating a molecular receptor into a chemically-modified field effect transistor (ChemFET) device to generate a functional hydrosulfide (HS–) sensor." Dr. Fontenot's declared past, current, and future employment with TCC creates a financial conflict because the design, conduct, reporting and outcome of this project could financially benefit The Climate Corporation, given the company's interest in chemical sensors.

Listed Research Project
A Sensor for quantification of hydrogen sulfide

Project Narrative Hydrogen sulfide (H2S) is a gasotransmitter that is involved in the regulation of different cellular processes, and its misregulation is associated with human health conditions ranging from diabetes and hypertension to inflammation and neurodegeneration. Due to the lack sensitive and rapid methods to quantify H2S levels in vivo or in vitro, precise information is missing regarding the actual H2S levels that may be indicative of certain disease states. Using a recently-developed pioneering class of receptors that bind HS? (the most prevalent form of H2S under physiological conditions) reversibly, the assembled team aims to integrate this novel approach into ChemFET architectures to develop new H2S/HS? measurement devices.

Filed on October 18, 2018.

Tell us what you know about Sean Fontenot's disclosure

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Sources: National Institutes of Health, public records requests filed at multiple public state universities

Notes: When a more specific filing date is not available for an individual financial disclosure or conflict of interest form, we use the year the form was filed. If the year was not disclosed, we report the range of years covered by our public records requests. In a few cases, a start date was provided instead of a filing date. In those cases, we use the start date instead.

Fewer than 10% of records from the University of Florida and fewer than 1% of records from the University of Texas system were removed because they did not contain enough information.

ProPublica obtained additional financial disclosures and conflict of interest forms that we have not yet digitized and added to the database. You can download those disclosures in the ProPublica Data Store.

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