Before the official faculty profiles of renowned Indiana University, Bloomington (IU) data privacy professor Xiaofeng Wang and his wife disappeared and the FBI raided two of the couple’s homes last week, the school is said to have been reviewing for months whether the professor received unreported research funding from China, WIRED has learned.
Indiana University contacted Wang in December to ask about a 2017-2018 grant in China that listed Wang as a researcher, according to an unsigned statement that appears to be written by a Purdue University professor and long-time collaborator of Wang seen by WIRED. The statement says that the author believed IU was concerned that Wang allegedly failed to properly disclose the funding to the university and in applications for US federal research grants.
The statement has been circulating among cybersecurity and privacy scholars at universities around the world in recent days and was sent to WIRED by three separate sources. It claims that Wang had explained the funding situation to IU, then was told in February that the school would continue looking into the matter.
Alex Tanford, a professor emeritus at Indiana University and the IU Bloomington Chapter president of the American Association of University Professors, says Wang reached out to him and said that he had been accused of alleged research misconduct. Tanford says he provided Wang guidance as a member of the faculty board of review. IU did not answer WIRED’s questions regarding any probes into Wang.
“The charge seemed trivial—that he had failed to properly disclose who was principal investigator on a grant application and had not fully listed all his coauthors on an article,” Tanford tells WIRED of the allegations. He says Wang wanted to know if the university had the right to lock him out of his office and computer, as he was in the middle of ongoing research.
Research papers Wang published between 2017 and 2018 list funding from places like the National Science Foundation, National Institutes of Health, the US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, the US Army Research Office, Google, and Samsung, according to a WIRED review of his publications from the time period.
Wang regularly collaborated with researchers at the Institute of Information Engineering (IIE) at the Chinese Academy of Sciences, a government-funded cybersecurity research lab. In papers, Wang and his coauthors disclosed that the IIE scholars received funding from sources such as the National Natural Science Foundation of China, but that Wang was being supported by US grants. It’s not uncommon for professors at US institutions to collaborate with researchers in China, and there's no public evidence to suggest that the arrangements were improper.
According to the unsigned statement’s title and metadata, it appears to have been authored by Ninghui Li, a computer science professor at Purdue who has collaborated on research with Wang since at least 2006. The pair also serve together on the board of the ACM Special Interest Group on Security, Audit, and Control (SIGSAC), which aims “to develop the information security profession by sponsoring high quality research conferences and workshops,” according to the Association for Computer Machinery’s website. Li did not respond to emailed requests for comment nor a voicemail left on his office phone.
Jason Covert, one of attorneys representing Xiaofeng Wang and his wife, Nianli Ma, a library systems analyst whose employee profile was also removed by Indiana University, tells WIRED that Wang and Ma are both “safe” and that neither of them have been arrested. Their legal team is not currently aware of any pending criminal charges against them, and while the couple’s attorneys have viewed a search warrant from the Department of Justice, Covert says they have not received a copy of the affidavit establishing probable cause.
Wang is considered among the top researchers in the field of privacy, data security, and biometric privacy, and his sudden disappearance came as a shock to many of his academic peers. Wang joined IU in 2004 and is the lead principal investigator of the multidisciplinary Center for Distributed Confidential Computing, which he established in 2022 with an almost $3 million grant from the National Science Foundation (NSF), according to a since-deleted bio on IU’s website. As part of his application for the NSF funding and other US federal research grants, Wang would have been required to disclose other grants he already received or were currently pending review.
On March 28, the FBI searched two home addresses associated with Wang. The same day, IU also reportedly terminated Wang’s job via an email sent by provost Rahul Shrivastav, which WIRED obtained and was first reported by The Indiana Daily Student. The email also said it was understood that Wang had recently accepted a position with a university in Singapore, a detail also repeated in the statement attributed to Li.
The statement says Wang planned to start at the unnamed Singaporean university on June 1, 2025, and requested a leave of absence from Indiana University in early March. But IU responded by “putting him on administrative leave, removing his IU homepage, and disabling his IU email address,” it claims.
Wang’s new job offer “would be irrelevant in any event because it is for [the] next academic year and would not justify firing him,” Tanford says. Terminating his employment via an email was a violation of university policy, Tanford claims, which prohibits firing a tenured professor without cause, and requires a 10-day notice and a hearing before a faculty board of review, if requested by the staff member. “The faculty is deeply concerned. If the administration can fire a tenured professor without due process and in violation of a policy approved by our trustees, none of us is safe,” he says.
Reached for comment, an IU spokesperson declined to answer detailed questions from WIRED about prior communications between the university and Wang and the school’s decision to fire him.
“Indiana University was recently made aware of a federal investigation of an Indiana University faculty member,” university spokesperson Mark Bode tells WIRED in an emailed statement. “At the direction of the FBI, Indiana University will not make any public comments regarding this investigation. In accordance with Indiana University practices, Indiana University will also not make any public comments regarding the status of this individual.”
The FBI has so far not commented on the reason for its activities surrounding Wang’s properties. In a statement sent to WIRED, Indianapolis-based spokesperson Chris Bavender says, “The FBI conducted court authorized law enforcement activity at homes in Carmel and Bloomington, Indiana last Friday. We have no further comment at this time.”
WIRED could not immediately reach Wang or Ma for comment directly, but Covert, their attorney, provided a statement on their behalf.
“Prof. Wang and Ms. Ma are thankful for the outpouring of support they have received from colleagues at Indiana University and their peers across the academic community,” the statement reads. “They look forward to clearing their names and resuming their successful careers at the conclusion of this investigation.”
To many in the academic research community, the events surrounding Wang and another Chinese-born scholar in Florida who was fired recently are reminiscent of the China Initiative, a US Department of Justice campaign launched under the first Trump administration to combat cybercrime and economic espionage. Critics accused the program of unfairly targeting Chinese-born researchers and broader Asian-immigrant and Asian-American academic communities.
The DOJ abandoned the program under the Biden administration in 2022 after it lost or withdrew charges in a number of associated cases. At the time, a top DOJ official said it had “helped give rise to a harmful perception” that there are lower standards for prosecuting conduct related to China, and people with ties to the country are treated differently. But several congressional efforts have since sought to resurrect the program or start similar law enforcement campaigns, including a 2023 bill that passed the House but not the Senate last year.
“We, like many other organizations and individuals, have broad concerns that the end of the [China Initiative] is just in name but does not reflect a change in fact and substance,” Jeremy Wu, the coorganizer of APA Justice, a nonprofit organization that advocates against racial profiling, said in a March webinar at the Michigan State University. Wu declined WIRED’s request to comment on the events surrounding Wang.
Matthew Green, a professor at Johns Hopkins University who specializes in cryptography and cryptographic engineering says that, while he doesn’t know Wang personally, he is troubled by how secretive Indiana University has been about the circumstances that led to his alleged firing. “This is not normal behavior by a university,” Green tells WIRED.
Green says he worries that cases like Wang’s could make young engineers from China think twice about studying at American universities, and even motivate talented researchers who have lived in the US for decades to instead consider working abroad. “We may lose a huge amount of expertise,” Green says.
