A Harvard University professor charged with hiding his ties to a Chinese-run recruitment program has been found guilty on all counts.
Charles Lieber, 62, the former chair of Harvard's department of chemistry and chemical biology, has pleaded not guilty to two counts of filing false tax returns, two counts of making false statements and two counts of failing to file reports for a foreign bank account in China.
After five days of testimony in the Boston federal court, the jury deliberated for about two hours and 45 minutes.
Attorney Marc Mukasey, Lieber's defense attorney, had argued that prosecutors lacked proof of the charges. He maintained that investigators didn't keep any records of their interviews with Lieber prior to his arrest.
He stated that prosecutors would not be able to prove that Lieber had acted knowingly, intentionally, or willfully, or that he made a material false statement. He also stressed that Lieber wasn't charged with illegally transferring any technology or proprietary information to China.
In January, Prosecutors argued that Lieber, who was arrested in January, knowingly hid his involvement in China's Thousand Talents Plan, a program designed to recruit people with knowledge of foreign technology and intellectual property to China to protect his career and reputation.
Lieber denied any involvement during investigations from the US authorities, including the National Institutes of Health, which had provided him millions of dollars in research funding, prosecutors said.
Lieber also hidden his income from the Chinese program, including $50,000 a month from the Wuhan University of Technology, up to $158,000 in living expenses and more than 1.5 m in grants, according to prosecutors.
In exchange, Lieber agreed to publish articles, organise international conferences and apply for patents on behalf of the Chinese university.
The case is one of the highest profile to come from the US Department of Justice's so-called China Initiative. In 2018 the effort to curb suspected economic espionage from China has faced criticism that it harms academic research and amounts to racial profiling of Chinese researchers.
Hundreds of faculty at Stanford, Yale, Berkeley, Princeton, Temple and other prominent colleges have signed on to letters to US attorney general Merrick Garland calling for him to end the initiative.
The effort compromises the nation's competitiveness in research and technology, and has had a chilling effect on recruiting foreign scholars, according to the academics. The investigators have disproportionally targeted researchers of Chinese origin, according to the letters.
Lieber was on paid administrative leave from Harvard since being arrested in January 2020.