The chairman of Harvard University’s chemistry department was charged with lying to the U.S. government about his alleged connections to China.
Charles Lieber, 60, allegedly made false statements to the Defense Department and the National Institutes of Health about his participation in China’s Thousand Talents Program, according to the criminal complaint that was unsealed Tuesday.
The Thousand Talents Program, a Chinese government-run program, seeks to recruit Chinese and foreign academics and entrepreneurs to work in science and technology fields in China. The U.S. government has been critical of the program, saying it’s designed to help China gain access to proprietary information.
“In some cases, this has resulted in violations of U.S. laws, including economic espionage, theft of trade secrets, and grant fraud,” John Brown, a top counterintelligence official at the FBI, said in November.
According to the charging documents, Lieber was paid up to $50,000 per month in salary and $150,000 per year in living expenses by Wuhan University of Technology. He was also paid more than $1.5 million by the university and the Chinese government to build a laboratory in Wuhan.
Lieber did not disclose the payments to Harvard University, which later confronted him about using its name and logo without consent for the Wuhan laboratory.
In April 2018, Lieber told investigators he was familiar with the Thousand Talents Program but had never been asked to participate in it, despite evidence that he had signed a three-year agreement with the Wuhan University of Technology.
Harvard University said Lieber has been placed on indefinite paid administrative leave.
“The charges brought by the U.S. government against Professor Lieber are extremely serious. Harvard is cooperating with federal authorities, including the National Institutes of Health, and is initiating its own review of the alleged misconduct,” Harvard said in a statement to the Washington Examiner.
Lieber, who specialized in nanoscale electronics, was one of three Boston-area scientists accused on Tuesday of working on behalf of China, as the FBI seeks to root out theft of biomedical research from American universities and laboratories.
Chinese researcher Zaosong Zheng, 30, was arrested in December and is accused of trying to smuggle vials of cancer cells out of the United States. Authorities alleged that Zheng stole the vials from a laboratory at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center. He was charged with making false statements and is being held without bail in Massachusetts.
Another Chinese national, 29-year-old Yanqing Ye, who had studied at Boston University, was accused of lying to authorities about her status as a lieutenant in the People’s Liberation Army. Ye, who was charged with visa fraud, making false statements, and acting as an agent of a foreign government, has not been arrested because she’s in China.
