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A Cybersecurity Professor Disappeared Amid an FBI Search. His Family Is ‘Determined to Fight’


The abrupt firing of Xiaofeng Wang and his wife from Indiana University last month has shocked the academic community, and is stoking fears that Chinese-born scholars are being intentionally targeted.

The wife of data privacy professor Xiaofeng Wang, who was fired from his tenured job at Indiana University, Bloomington (IU) the same day the couple’s houses were searched by the Federal Bureau of Investigation last month, said on Monday that she believes her family has been unfairly targeted by the US government and is the victim of what she described as “misplaced accusations of academic misconduct.” The campaign, which was started during President Trump’s first term in office with the stated goal of combating economic espionage, was accused by critics of unfairly targeting Chinese-born researchers and other Asian-immigrant and Asian-American academic communities. One of the most high-profile of them was the case of MIT professor Gang Chen, who was charged in 2021 under the China initiative for allegedly failing to disclose links to several Chinese institutions in grant applications and also spoke at Monday’s webinar.

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