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I'm an early-career researcher, supervising a very poorly performing PhD student - reaching the end of my tether (Australia)

Hi all - seeking advice, experience and options - please let me know if this is not appropriate for this sub.

Sorry - this is long.

I am an early career researcher (4-years post PhD) and my research is in genomics.

I am a co-supervisor of an international PhD student that is performing extremely poorly. Her project is being undertaken between a university and an industry/NGO. Her primary supervisor is in the university, and I am the least senior of her supervisors, my role is in industry/NGO.  None of her other supervisors have any experience in genomics - so the majority of her supervision has fallen to me.

In Australia - a PhD takes 3-4 years full time, and she is 2.5 years into her PhD. She has an undergrad and masters from her home country in a completely unrelated field - these helped her get a stipend.

From day dot it was apparent that she had interest in genomics and bioinformatics, but woeful technique and zero aptitude for any laboratory work. Her first aim/experiment/chapter took over a year, remains unfinished and generated no meaningful data (she could not replicate/did not get consistent results.)

She argued that she did not get results because there was something wrong with the samples.

For her candidature seminar, her primary supervisor picked the most kind and lenient examiners - they identified a number of gaps and shortfalls in her project plan. She was passed and allowed to continue her PhD.She should not have been passed. The university used to have the option/ability to put a student on probation if they are not performing, requiring a number of deadlines to be met and the student to show due cause as to why they should be allowed to continue in their PhD - this option does not exist anymore.

We changed her entire aims to make it as easy as possible for her to get some results, to have as much in silico analysis from publicly available data as possible. She has shown some aptitude for this but is very slow to integrate or perform these experiments, even with me holding her hand! We suggested she use the university computing cluster to undertake some time-critical and computationally expensive analyses for her current project, and put her in touch with both the university ICT and other students that use the computing cluster to undertake their projects, who took time out of their own studies and research to assist her/help her - but she refused to as it was "mostly command line" and she "could not understand it".  She should have had this finished and done over a month ago - her study has basically been published by another group.

Where this really brings me to the end of my tether is that I have been tasked to do the experimental work for her final chapter. Which consists of RNA extractions on 100 clinical samples and then enrichment library preparation and sequencing to generate data for her to analyse. Seriously.

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I have two other PhD students who are coming up to their final seminars - they have been exemplary students and very much independent. I have not been able to give them the time I should be. I have my own projects too which I need to complete and report on and publish. I don't have time because I've been stuck holding this students hand from the very first day.

I have brought her lack of aptitude and poor performance up with all of her supervisors from the very start - I basically get told it sucks but do everything you can to get her finished and out of her by the end of her 3rd year.   I have had zero support from any of her supervisors.

Has anyone been in this situation before? how did you address/handle it? is there opportunity at her final presentation/thesis review to recommend that she fail her PhD? Should I go above her other supervisors and bring this up to the university/course coordinator/dean?

Any advice or guidance is so very very much appreciated. Thank you.
gpt
Who’s asking you to do the 100 extractions and enrichments and what is your end goal for your current position? To become a Professor or a Senior researcher ? Maybe consider leveraging this work into a better authorship such as a first first author ?