U has questions on prof's e-mail claims

A February e-mail from one of two high-profile University of Minnesota professors accused of drawing salaries from two schools claimed a "completely full" schedule at Georgia Tech at the same time the U says he was working full time in Minneapolis.

According to Minnesota officials, Francois Sainfort and his wife, Julie Jacko, had been on the university's payroll for several months at the time he characterized his spring semester schedule at Georgia Tech as full.

In the Feb. 11 e-mail exchange, obtained from the Atlanta school through a public records request, Georgia Tech associate engineering Dean John Leonard wrote that his school's employees cannot be on the payroll of another organization other than as a consultant.

Sainfort replied: "As a matter of fact, Julie and I have not even signed an employee contract yet with Minnesota. ... We have only agreed to unofficially start this semester with full residence starting in May."

University general counsel Mark Rotenberg said the pair signed employment contracts and were added to the U's payroll in October and were expected to be full time at Minnesota at the beginning of January.

"That e-mail communication is difficult, and we're going to need to understand exactly how that e-mail came to be written and find an explanation to that e-mail, if there is one," Rotenberg said.

Earlier this month, Georgia Tech began the process of firing the two professors for double-dipping. The school, which said the two signed contracts to work at Georgia Tech for this entire school year after signing contracts to work at Minnesota, has turned the case over to the Georgia attorney general.

Martin Goldberg, a Miami attorney representing Sainfort and Jacko, said, "All of our comments and discussions about those e-mails will be made to the attorney general's office."

Loose ends or full-time work?

Rotenberg said it is very common in higher education for researchers to work at one institution while tying up loose ends at a previous school.

According to a letter from an Atlanta lawyer to Georgia Tech, Sainfort was scheduled to represent the Atlanta school as late as April 10 in a meeting with a hospital executive.

On April 2, the two wrote checks to Georgia Tech for a combined $2,619.36 for travel reimbursement. Georgia Tech sent letters to them regarding tenure revocation on April 16.

Georgia Tech is also believed to be questioning payments totaling $86,000 that the school made in consulting fees to Jacko's brother.

Sainfort and Jacko remain employed by the U, but Rotenberg said his office is "gathering facts and putting the pieces of the story together."

What they were offered

The two have significant responsibility in the U's ventures into health informatics, an area of health science that attempts to make sense of large volumes of computer-generated data. They have a strong track record of securing millions in sponsored research grants, something expected to continue at Minnesota. As a result, the university has a stake in the battle.

In August 2007, Sainfort was offered a position as division head of the School of Public Health's Division of Health Policy and Management and Jacko was hired to be the director of the school's Institute on Health Informatics.

The two were scheduled to begin work in October, their tenure was approved this fall and they were to be in place in Minneapolis in January.

Sainfort is being paid $285,000 by the school and also holds a prestigious Mayo professorship. Jacko is being paid $216,000. The two were offered an additional $25,000 in moving expenses and $39,000 for housing transition. The couple's five-bedroom, six-bath home in the tony Buckhead area of Atlanta is currently on the market for $1.6 million.

In addition, the two were wooed in part with promises for the hiring of additional faculty members. Sainfort's offer letter from public health Dean John Finnegan Jr. included provisions for "searches in 2008-09 and 2009-10 for a minimum of five faculty [members] in areas to be agreed upon by you and me." Jacko's offer included a provision for "$150,000 recurring available for the recruitment of new faculty."

Rotenberg said he hopes to get to the bottom of the case within the next few weeks. "I think there are a number of missing pieces here, and we're attempting to gather them and evaluate them as soon as we can," he said.

Jeff Shelman • 612-673-7478