Cybersecurity Professor Faced China-Funding Inquiry Before Disappearing, Sources Say
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Summary
The FBI searched the homes of at least two addresses associated with Indiana University (IU) professor and privacy expert, Xiaofeng Wang, last week.
IU had been reviewing whether Wang had failed to disclose receiving of research funding from China for a 2017-2018 grant while also applying for US federal research grants.
Wang’s attorney has affirmed that he and his wife are safe, and that the couple is not aware of any pending criminal charges against them.
Wang is considered a leading researcher in the fields of data security and biometrics, and his disappearance has been a shock to the academic community.
In 2022, he secured almost $3m in funding from the National Science Foundation to lead the multidisciplinary Center for Distributed Confidential Computing.
Wang was allegedly fired by email on March 28 without due process, according to the president of the IU Bloomington Chapter of the American Association of University Professors.
Critics of previous probes into Chinese-born scholars have labelled them as disproportionately targeting such individuals, reminiscent of the failed US Department of Justice’s so-called China Initiative.
