Looks rather odd, certainly.
Just to add, from my knowledge of a uni Research Ethics Committee, and similar experiments in psychology, in a UK university BTW, ANY study with human participants has to go through an ethical review process, including post grad and undergrad student projects. And you are supposed to keep the data for umpteen years. If you were basing papers on undergrad students work, I would bloody well expect that the STUDENTS who did all the slog of collecting the data would at the very least be NAMED, and even if the supervisor wrote the paper, they would be incuded as authors, since in effect they DID the data gathering/experiment design/data analysis. If they DIDN'T do any of that, bloody weird student project (even for psychologists!). So, this rings a lot of bells for me. The statistical anomalies look like someone is possibly faking data (could be the students, for example, after all they might think -- we do all the work, we ask the questions and record the answers, and we don't even get a thankyou when he writes the paper! Why bother, we'll ask six people and say we asked sixty, he won't complain as long as he gets another paper out of it!). And even without those anomalies, the PROCEDURES seem well dodgy, in that even if the data etc is REAL, he is getting ALL the credit, and the people who actually did the collection and analysis are getting nothing (apart from passing that module and their degree).
Of course, the issue here is that his choice of news-worthy papers and issues mean that he is generating LOADS of publicity for his department/university. Unlike, say, those who want to do more unpopular research on detransitioners who apparently get kicked out of touch by uni ethics committees because it would make the uni look bad.................