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Boston Globe

Charles Lieber, former Harvard University chemist convicted of lying about ties to China, joins faculty of Chinese university

Lieber was chairman of Harvard's Department of Chemistry and Chemical Biology when he was Seven Nobel Prize winners and dozens of other scientists Advertisement Lieber was the most prominent scientist charged by federal prosecutors in a campaign to curb academic espionage at the time. Those cases were a priority for federal prosecutors under the leadership of Andrew E. Lelling, the US attorney for Massachusetts at the time. A jury convicted Lieber in December 2021 of two counts of making false statements to the government for denying he had participated in the Thousand Talents Program; two counts of filing false tax returns for failing to report payments from Wuhan University of Technology in 2013 and 2014 for his participation in the program; and two counts of failing to file reports disclosing he had a Chinese bank account. Advertisement A federal judge sentenced Lieber in April 2023 to six months of home confinement and ordered him to pay a $50,000 fine and $33,600 in restitution for the back taxes he owed. In December, a judge signed off on Lieber's request to travel to China for a week in January 'for the purposes of discussing potential employment and scientific collaborations,' according to court records. Prosecutors presented evidence at trial that Lieber signed a five-year agreement in 2011 with the Chinese university, which agreed to pay him $50,000 a month and $158,000 in living expenses. He also allegedly received $1.5 million to set up a joint Harvard-Wuhan research lab at the Chinese university. Prosecutors alleged that Lieber failed to disclose the information to Harvard and the federal government and also failed to comply with Internal Revenue Service regulations on overseas payments. At the time, Lieber was the principal investigator for the Lieber Research Group at Harvard, which received more than $15 million in grants from the National Institutes of Health and the Department of Defense and was required to disclose funding received from foreign institutions or governments. Instead, prosecutors alleged he repeatedly denied receiving any foreign funding. Material from previous Globe coverage was used in this report. Advertisement Nick Stoico can be reached at