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Holly Chik

Dannie Peng

Shi Huang

US cybersecurity expert Wang Xiaofeng “is safe”, a fellow researcher in China said on Wednesday, declining to comment further on the whereabouts of the professor targeted by the FBI.
The Federal Bureau of Investigation raided Wang’s two homes in Indiana on Friday, the same day that his employer, Indiana University Bloomington (IUB), terminated his job.
Wang was a tenured professor of computer science, engineering and informatics.
His whereabouts and the reason for the searches remain unknown.
However, according to an undated, one-page statement circulating among Wang’s colleagues, he had been investigated by the university for not disclosing his involvement in a research grant in China.
The Post was unable to verify the source or the details of the statement.
According to the statement, Wang was asked to “explain the fact that he was listed on a 2017-2018 grant in China that he did not disclose to IU”.
“My understandings, which could be inaccurate, are that: Prof. Wang was an oversea collaborator on the project; the grant supported his collaborators in China; and IU’s main concern is that Prof. Wang did not list this grant in Current & Pending forms in his grant application(s) to United States funding agencies,” it said.


Wang “explained the situation” to the university, which told Wang that it would investigate the matter further in February this year, it added.
The statement referred to Wang as both an Indiana University professor and the chairman of the Association for Computing Machinery’s Special Interest Group on Security, Audit and Control.
The statement also referred to the case of Gang Chen, a China-born professor of mechanical engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, who was accused of misrepresenting his relationship to China on funding documents in 2021.
The indictment also accused his research group of receiving US$19 million from Southern University of Science and Technology in Shenzhen.
A year later, US prosecutors dropped all charges, admitting that they could not prove the case.
“There are certainly differences between the two cases; however, it seems that missing reporting of funding from China in Current & Pending forms was the key issue in both,” the statement said.
Chen was one of the thousands of scientists suspected of hiding Chinese connections investigated under the China Initiative, a US Department of Justice programme launched in 2018 during US President Donald Trump’s first administration.
Most cases were dropped due to lack of evidence, and the programme was scrapped in 2022 – a year after Joe Biden took over the White House.

The statement circulating among Wang’s colleagues also described Wang’s plan to take up a job at a university in Singapore, a move that was mentioned in the termination letter IUB sent to Wang.
Wang was recruited by other universities “starting from earlier” and he had accepted an offer from Singapore with plans to start on June 1, the statement said.
In early March, Wang notified IUB and hoped to obtain a leave of absence. The university put him on administrative leave, removed his homepage and disabled his email address “around March 7 to 9”, according to the statement.
It also said that Wang had been communicating on matters about the special interest group using his new Gmail address.
On Monday, American business news channel CNBC quoted Alex Tanford, IUB professor emeritus of law, as saying that Wang emailed him on Friday to say that “I’ve been terminated”.
Tanford is also the president of the IUB chapter of the American Association of University Professors, which opposed the university’s decision to “summarily terminate” Wang’s tenured appointment.


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Indiana University, Bloomington, notified Wang that they were terminating his employment. Photo: Getty Images

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Unverified statement circulating among Wang’s colleagues says case linked to research grant in China from about seven years ago


Unverified statement circulating among Wang’s colleagues says case linked to research grant in China from about seven years ago.


Exclusive | US cyber expert Wang Xiaofeng ‘is safe’ after FBI raids, source says

Unverified statement circulating among Wang’s colleagues says case linked to research grant in China from about seven years ago

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