UNC Asheville names new director of health center amid whistleblower suit

A longtime University of North Carolina at Asheville professor has been tapped to lead the school’s health and wellness research center, an operation dogged by a whistleblower lawsuit and a series of Carolina Journal reports on its use of federal grant money.

Aubrianne “Aubri” Rote, who has taught at the university for more than a decade and chairs its Health Sciences Department, took over as director of the North Carolina Center for Health & Wellness (NCCHW) on July 1, the university confirmed to Carolina Journal. She takes the reins from Emma Olson, who had run the center on an interim basis since December 2023. Olson, who is now associate director of the center, remains a named defendant in the whistleblower suit.

The leadership change lands while the center is still contending with claims from one of its own former researchers. Aidan Settman was brought in to help publish research from the center’s pandemic-era Student Health Ambassadors (SHA) program. According to his lawsuit, Settman was terminated four days after he took allegations of research misconduct and manipulated data to UNC Asheville’s top lawyer. He sued the university and Olson in February 2025, as reported by Carolina Journal in March.

A Buncombe County judge dismissed the suit in May 2025, but Settman appealed, and filed his opening brief in that appeal on Feb. 26, 2026. The appeal remains pending.

In an emailed statement to Carolina Journal, Eden Bloss, chief marketing officer for UNC Asheville, said Rote “was selected after an open call and competitive search for a faculty director.” The search was initiated on Feb. 9, 2026, and closed on Feb. 16, 2026, Bloss said.

The search came after the center had operated under interim leadership for more than two years, and in a month of renewed activity in the Settman case.

The role itself has also changed shape. Amy Joy Lanou, who led the center until late 2023, served as its executive director, while Rote holds the post as a faculty director, concurrent with her duties as department chair.

Rote’s appointment fills a seat held on an interim basis since Dec. 1, 2023, when Lanou left the role. Lanou was named director of the North Carolina Institute for Public Health at UNC-Chapel Hill’s Gillings School of Global Public Health, in an appointment announced in December 2023. She led the center during the period covered by the disputed grants and is named in the Settman complaint as one of the people to whom Settman reported his concerns.

Rote has chaired the Health Sciences Department since 2020 and holds a doctorate from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, where she studied kinesiology and exercise science.

Carolina Journal has also filed a public records request with the university’s Office of the General Counsel seeking the search and appointment records, including the authorization of the position and communications concerning the center’s leadership reorganization.

The series so far

The leadership change is the latest development in a Carolina Journal investigation that began with a single whistleblower lawsuit and widened into questions about how UNC System faculty publish taxpayer-funded research.

The first installment, published in March, reported the whistleblower suit brought by Settman, who claims data in the center’s SHA program — a pandemic program funded by more than $1.27 million in CARES Act and Dogwood Health Trust money — was manipulated to hide poor results, and that the resulting paper relied on fabricated evidence and “gift authorship.”

UNC Asheville has denied the allegations. A judge dismissed the suit in May 2025 on the grounds that Settman, an independent contractor, was not covered by the state whistleblower statute.

The second story, published in April, examined the publication cited by the center to help justify the grant — the Journal of Higher Education Theory and Practice (JHETP), a North American Business Press (NABP) title. 

Carolina Journal reported that JHETP was dropped from Scopus indexing in 2024, ranks in the lowest tiers of major journal-quality lists, charges authors to publish, and lists academics as editorial board members who told CJ they had no editorial relationship with it.

The journal’s editor-in-chief also sits on an editorial board at Allied Academies, a subsidiary of OMICS International.

The third story, published in June, traced Allied Academies from its origins as a North Carolina academic-business publisher founded by two Western Carolina University professors to its absorption by OMICS International, which a federal court ordered in 2019 to pay a $50.1 million judgment over deceptive academic publishing practices. An Allied-branded entity was named in the FTC’s permanent injunction.

The fourth story, published in July, found that an associate vice president at the UNC System Office, Michelle Solér, co-authored a CARES Act-funded evaluation of a system-wide initiative she leads — the Math Pathways effort — in JHETP without disclosing her role in the program. 

Carolina Journal also found at least a dozen faculty members at seven UNC System schools with papers in NABP journals. The System Office said it sets no central rules on where faculty publish.

“UNC Asheville names new director of health center amid whistleblower suit” was originally published on www.carolinajournal.com.