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Under-fire family minister to stop using doctoral title

Image: Olaf Kosinsky [CC BY-SA 3.0], via Wikimedia Commons

Franziska Giffey faces renewed investigation into her PhD

Germany’s minister for family affairs, Franziska Giffey (pictured last year), has said that she will stop using the prefix Dr, after the Free University Berlin commenced a second investigation of her doctoral thesis.

An initial investigation into Giffey’s PhD, which concluded in November 2019, resulted in an official reprimand for the minister, but the university decided to let her keep the title. The investigation concluded that 27 text passages in her doctoral thesis fulfilled the criteria for plagiarism.

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