A global leader in neurology and neuroscience

In July 2024, the Neuroscience Research Australia (NeuRA) in Sydney was given a new leader: Matthew Kiernan. Who soon proceeded with mass-sacking everyone he didn’t approve of. But what about Kiernan’s own science, especially his clinical research, is it really as great as they say?

As part of the NeuRA directorship package, Kiernan was appointed Scientia Professor of Neuroscience at the University of New South Wales (UNSW). Prior to his arrival to NeuRA, Kiernan was co-Director of the Brain and Mind Centre and Chair of Neurology at the University of Sydney. He also used to be President of the Australian and New Zealand Association of Neurologists and President of the Australian Brain Foundation.

Quite a list of achievements for a dude whose papers contain hand-fudged graphs.

The UNSW announcement quoted NeuRA Chair James MacNevin lauding Kiernan as someone who will “bring superlative standards of scientific, clinical, and academic excellence“. Vlado Perkovic, Provost and Dean of UNSW Medicine & Health described Kiernan as “a global leader in neurology and neuroscience“.

Kiernan himself was quoted complimenting NeuRA’s “stellar team of research scientists and clinicians“. Which he is now cleaning out with an iron broom, on the occasion of the new 10-year partnership agreement between UNSW and NeuRA, which will take force on 1 January 2026. In this regard, Kiernan announced “increasingly profound breakthroughs in diagnosis and the treatment of society’s most pressing concerns“, and there are people at NeuRA who (in his view) stood in the way of progress.

I obtained this recent email by Kiernan, the authenticity of which he did not deny. Highlights mine:

“Dear colleagues,
 
I am writing to you to provide an update regarding an important decision recently made by the NeuRA Board.

After careful consideration of our priorities, funding environment and strategic direction, the Board has decided to divest from the research carried out by the Gandevia and Butler groups, effective 31 December this year.  What this means is two of our long-standing research leaders, Professor Simon Gandevia and Professor Jane Butler, will be leaving NeuRA at the end of 2025.
 
Simon of course was one of the four Founding Scientists of the Prince of Wales Medical Research Institute (in 1992), which was later renamed NeuRA, and was elected a member of the Australian Academy of Science in 1998. His record of service to Australian science, and to its ethical practices, is one of which he can be rightly proud.
 
Jane has similarly been at NeuRA for more than two decades, now as a Senior Principal Research Scientist and conjoint academic at UNSW Medicine. In 2018, Jane won a NHMRC Research Excellence Award for outstanding contributions to health and medical research, and has supervised many doctoral and postdoctoral students across her career.
 
I would like to take this opportunity to thank Simon and Jane for their long service to NeuRA.
 
We will work with Simon and Jane to finalise their research projects and talk to their teams about future opportunities.
 
I would also like to acknowledge the dedication of Simon, Jane and their respective teams to improving the lives of people with spinal cord injury.
 
Sincerely,
 
Matthew”

It seems, Kiernan sacked not only Simon Gandevia (archived NeuRA profile) and Jane Butler (archived NeuRA profile), but also everyone working in their labs. He also didn’t deny this.

Heads had to roll also because Kiernan and his Director of Research Agnus Henderson announced in their grand scheme “NeuRA Forward
2025 to 2030” that from now on, only research on the brain will be allowed at NeuRA, the new buzzword missions will be:

• “Protect brain health across the lifespan”,
• “Maximise brain function”
• “Advance precision brain diagnostics“

Those who study wrong aspects of neurology and neuroscience (e.g. spinal injury, pain, or motor-neuron disorders) will be shown the door. As you will see, Kiernan actually built his career on the exact kind of “useless” neurology for which he now sacks people.

Here is another sacked NeuRA scientist – Jan Fullerton (archived NeuRA profile), UNSW associate professor, who worked at NeuRA for the last 19 years, in fact on brain disorders. Still, this didn’t protect her, she also will be out by the end of this year and is looking for a new job, as she wrote on LinkedIn:

Now, to Kiernan’s own science. He has 45 papers on PubPeer, almost all are clinical studies with patients, in many of which Kiernan pronounced to have found a clear interventional effect despite the p-value between control and treated groups being way above 0.05. You may wonder why such pathetic bullshit managed to pass peer review, but let I remind you about all this power positions Kiernan holds, and it seems, he destroys people’s careers for much less.

Here a good example of Kiernan’s fishing for significance, from a very fresh clinical study with 58 patients suffering from motor neuron disease:

Srestha Mazumder , Antonia S. Carroll , Hannah C. Timmins , Matthew C. Kiernan , Colin J. Mahoney Impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on the mental and physical wellbeing of patients with motor neuron disease and other neuromuscular disease Frontiers in Neurology (2025) doi: 10.3389/fneur.2025.1514983 

“A Mann–Whitney U test was used to determine if MND and non-MND patients differed in their experiences of mental and physical wellbeing (see Tables 3, 4). With regards to mental health the most significant difference was observed on a measure of loneliness (U = (221), p = 0.005, 95% CI [−16.0, −3.0]), where non-MND patients (mean = 49.04) expressed more feelings of loneliness compared to MND patients (mean = 39.38). This was followed by anxiety (U = (264), p = 0.054, 95% CI [−4.0, 0.001]) where non-MND patients showed higher levels of anxiety (mean = 6.63) compared to MND patients (mean = 4.68).

The two groups did not differ in their resilience (U = 42.50, p = 0.051, 95% CI [−0.001, 60.00]), but approached significance.”

The highlights are by the PubPeer commenter, who wondered why in one case p=0.054 indicated a clear difference, but in another case, p=0.051 proved the absence of any difference between patient groups.

Another one, with 49 dementia patients:

Rebekah M. Ahmed , Cassandra Kaizik , Muireann Irish , Eneida Mioshi , Nadene Dermody , Matthew C. Kiernan , Olivier Piguet , John R. Hodges Characterizing Sexual Behavior in Frontotemporal Dementia Journal of Alzheimer’s disease (2015) doi: 10.3233/jad-150034

“As shown in Fig. 2, 80% of the bvFTD group were less affectionate toward their partners, versus 60% in SD and 40% in AD (p = 0.104). […]
In terms of receiving affection, 65% of the bvFTD group showed a decrease in liking to receive affection versus only 46% in SD and 12% in the AD group (p = 0.320). […]
There was no difference between the groups in terms of caregivers ratings of overall effect of changes in sexual behavior on their relationship (χ22 = 5.3; p = 0.254)”

See, p-values of 0.1 and even 0.32 show a clear difference, while p=0.25 does not. That’s why Kiernan earns a huge salary as NeuRA director and decides on whom to fire.

Also in this study with 28 human participants, the authors claimed an effect where there obviously was none (p=0.06), and there were other issues:

Parvathi Menon , Matthew C. Kiernan, Steve Vucic Cortical excitability varies across different muscles Journal of Neurophysiology (2018) doi: 10.1152/jn.00148.2018 

The last author Steve Vucic wasn’t fired by Kiernan, but promoted: he is now Northcott Chair of Neurology and Director of Brain and Nerve Research Center at University of Sydney. More by Vucic and Kiernan, a clinical study with 7 patients suffering from spinobulbomuscular atrophy:

Steve Vucic, Matthew C. Kiernan Pathophysiologic insights into motor axonal function in Kennedy disease Neurology (2007) doi: 10.1212/01.wnl.0000279521.81846.59 

This was never drawn by a computer, but by a human. But which human, and why did he do it?

Maybe Kiernan is a Luddite and doesn’t trust computers? Maybe he and his lab members still draw all their graphs by hand on paper? Actually nope, Kiernan even makes money with IT!

In the clinical study Vucic et al 2025 (where p-values of 0.077 and 0.09 somehow proved “significant correlations“), Kiernan and Vucic declared to be developers of the MagXite software. They also simultaneously insisted to have “no known competing financial interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influence the work reported in this paper“. Which is not true: MagXite is marketed by the US company Soterix Medical, and advertised to deliver “Unprecedented early Amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) detection“.

It is still peculiar that Vucic and Kiernan, the inventors of the ALS detection software, work with manually-drawn graphs like in this study with 11 ALS patients:

Steve Vucic, Matthew C Kiernan Abnormalities in cortical and peripheral excitability in flail arm variant amyotrophic lateral sclerosis Journal of Neurology Neurosurgery & Psychiatry (2007) doi: 10.1136/jnnp.2006.105056

Another work of Vucic with his mentor, with 70 paediatric and adult patients with spinal muscular atrophy, where some data points look as if they were drawn-in by hand:

Michelle A. Farrar, Steve Vucic, Heather M. Johnston , Desirée Du Sart , Matthew C. Kiernan Pathophysiological insights derived by natural history and motor function of spinal muscular atrophy The Journal of Pediatrics (2013) doi: 10.1016/j.jpeds.2012.05.067 

Kiernan’s mentee Michelle Farrar was not sacked for such dodgy work, she is now professor at UNSW and specialist child neurologist at Sydney Children’s Hospital. Maybe, on the Red Nose day, Dr Farrar and Dr Kiernan can cheer up sick kids by teaching them to draw graphs? Another work of theirs with Vucic, on 11 patients with spinal muscle atrophy:

Michelle A Farrar , Steve Vucic, Heather M Johnston , Matthew C Kiernan Corticomotoneuronal integrity and adaptation in spinal muscular atrophy Archives of Neurology (2012) doi: 10.1001/archneurol.2011.1697 

Why, why, why. Goodness gracious, you try to draw all this by hand, let’s see then if your drawings will come out any straighter.

Another case, with 22 spinal cord injury patients. There, an effect was claimed at p=0.25 (and no effect elsewhere at p=0.26), also the provided Standard Error values made no sense:

Michael Lee , Matthew C. Kiernan , Vaughan G. Macefield , Bonne B. Lee , Cindy S.-Y. Lin Short-term peripheral nerve stimulation ameliorates axonal dysfunction after spinal cord injury Journal of Neurophysiology (2015) doi: 10.1152/jn.00839.2014 

It seems, also here the graphs were hand-drawn, apparently by the same trembling hand as in Farrar et al 2012:

Kiernan being the only common author might be a clue as to whose hand that was, if he replied to my emails, that is. He did not, and neither did his coauthors.

Again by Kiernan with another one of his mentees, Cindy Shin-Yi Lin, a clinical case report of lead neuropathy:

Arun V. Krishnan, Susanna B. Park , William Huynh , Cindy S.‐Y. Lin , Robert D. Henderson , Matthew C. Kiernan Impaired energy‐dependent processes underlie acute lead neuropathy Muscle & Nerve (2012) doi: 10.1002/mus.23425 

You want to know the reason for those bends? Go ask Kiernan, he will give you some bends. More by Lin and Kiernan, a study of 15 patients with spinal cord injury:

Cindy Shin-Yi Lin , Vaughan G Macefield , Mikael Elam , B Gunnar Wallin , Stella Engel , Matthew C Kiernan Axonal changes in spinal cord injured patients distal to the site of injury Brain (2006) doi: 10.1093/brain/awl339 

It’s a wave function not a graph. Someone should cut down on his drinking.

Now, some randomly drawn bollocks balls by Lin and Kiernan, a clinical study with 24 healthy individuals:

Yoshimitsu Shimatani , Cindy Shin-Yi Lin, José Manuel Matamala , Matthew C. Kiernan Strength-duration properties and excitability of motor and sensory axons across different target thresholds Journal of Neurophysiology (2023) doi: 10.1152/jn.00456.2022 

More dodgy error bars by Lin, and another mentee of Kiernan’s, Susanna Park. A foray into oncology, where 25 patients with colorectal cancer were studied:

Susanna B. Park, David Goldstein , Cindy S.-Y. Lin , Arun V. Krishnan, Michael L. Friedlander , Matthew C. Kiernan Acute abnormalities of sensory nerve function associated with oxaliplatin-induced neurotoxicity Journal of Clinical Oncology (2009) doi: 10.1200/jco.2008.19.3425 

Lin was not fired for such sloppy work of course, but promoted. She is now the inaugural Kam Ling Barbara Lo Chair in Neurodegenerative Disorders at the University of Sydney. Also Park wasn’t fired, she is now associate professor at the University of Sydney.

Same trio, including another mentee of Kiernan’s you already encountered, Arun Krishnan. He of course also made it to full professor, at University of Sydney. A study on 17 patients with in limbic encephalitis and acquired neuromyotonia, plus 20 healthy controls:

Susanna B. Park, Cindy S.-Y. Lin, Arun V. Krishnan, Neil G. Simon , Hugh Bostock , Angela Vincent , Matthew C. Kiernan Axonal dysfunction with voltage gated potassium channel complex antibodies Experimental Neurology (2014) doi: 10.1016/j.expneurol.2014.06.002 

Returning to oncology, similar problem of hand-drawn data points in this study on 28 breast cancer patients, by Lin, Park and Kiernan:

Susanna B. Park, Cindy S.‐Y. Lin, Arun V. Krishnan , Michael L. Friedlander , Craig R. Lewis , Matthew C. Kiernan Early, progressive, and sustained dysfunction of sensory axons underlies paclitaxel‐induced neuropathy Muscle & Nerve (2011) doi: 10.1002/mus.21874 

Kiernan with Vucic, Lin, Park and Farrar, a study on 25 patients with spinal muscular atrophy:

Michelle A Farrar , Steve Vucic, Cindy S-Y Lin, Susanna B Park, Heather M Johnston , Desirée Du Sart , Hugh Bostock , Matthew C Kiernan Dysfunction of axonal membrane conductances in adolescents and young adults with spinal muscular atrophy Brain (2011) doi: 10.1093/brain/awr229 

Figure 3 in that paper has same problems, with data points being of varying size and shape. Rascals.

Another artwork of Lin’s with her mentor who can’t draw a straight line, on patients with demyelinating polyneuropathy:

Jia-Ying Sung , Jowy Tani , Susanna B Park , Matthew C Kiernan , Cindy Shin-Yi Lin Early identification of ‘acute-onset’ chronic inflammatory demyelinating polyneuropathy Brain (2014) doi: 10.1093/brain/awu158 

Next case, where Lin, Park, Vucic together help Kiernan study 21 healthy volunteers. Plots have very different resolutions, this and other evidence suggests they are most likely manual drawings saved as pictures:

Antonia S Carroll , James Howells , Cindy S Y Lin, Susanna B Park, Neil Simon , Mary M Reilly , Steve Vucic, Matthew C Kiernan Differences in nerve excitability properties across upper limb sensory and motor axons Clinical Neurophysiology (2022) doi: 10.1016/j.clinph.2021.12.006 

Evil tongues might say that all this manual graph-painting might help bring otherwise insignificant effect sizes into the required high significance area.

Now, Kiernan and his three highly successful ladies, studying motor nerve excitability in 57 subjects from newborn babies to young adults:

Michelle A. Farrar , Susanna B. Park, Cindy S.‐Y. Lin, Matthew C. Kiernan Evolution of peripheral nerve function in humans: novel insights from motor nerve excitability The Journal of Physiology (2013) doi: 10.1113/jphysiol.2012.240820 

I’m not sure, is this artistry really covered by the informed consent of the patients?

It is really only Kiernan’s name which keeps recurring on all these papers with exact same kind of dodgy graphs. Here a study of neural excitability on 5 healthy volunteers:

David Burke, James Howells , Louise Trevillion , Penelope A. McNulty , Stacey K. Jankelowitz , Matthew C. Kiernan Threshold behaviour of human axons explored using subthreshold perturbations to membrane potential The Journal of Physiology (2009) doi: 10.1113/jphysiol.2008.163170 

Look mum, I drew some beads on a string.

Even Elisabeth Bik found something in a paper by Kiernan with his Sydney colleagues. This is a mouse study, something Kiernan normally doesn’t engage in:

Yazi D. Ke , Gabriella Chan , Kristie Stefanoska , Carol Au , Mian Bi , Julius Müller , Magdalena Przybyla , Astrid Feiten , Emmanuel Prikas , Glenda M. Halliday , Olivier Piguet , Matthew C. Kiernan , Michael Kassiou , John R. Hodges , Clement T. Loy , John S. Mattick , Arne Ittner , Jillian J. Kril, Greg T. Sutherland , Lars M. Ittner CNS cell type–specific gene profiling of P301S tau transgenic mice identifies genes dysregulated by progressive tau accumulation The Journal of biological chemistry (2019) doi: 10.1074/jbc.ra118.005263 

Let me end with a bizarrely narcissistic newspiece which Kiernan had published in Australian media a few days ago:

“In 1990, my mother told me she had been diagnosed with motor neurone disease (MND), and the outlook was bleak to say the least. As a junior clinician studying for my PhD, I hurriedly looked through the medical textbooks to see what treatments might be available.

There was nothing. Within six months my mother had passed away, and I had decided what path my medical career would take.”

The path of drawing graphs by hand and claiming clinical discoveries with p-values of 0.1 and more.

Again, neither Kiernan nor any of his relevant coauthors replied to my emails. They are probably busy saving children.

My suggestion on how Kiernan could deliver those “superlative standards of scientific, clinical, and academic excellence” to NeuRA: he should sack himself.

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