The jury trial in the US against Hu Anming, an Associate Professor in the University of Tennessee’s department of mechanical, aerospace and biomedical engineering in February 2020, on charges of defrauding NASA by hiding his relationship with a Chinese university began in the Knoxville federal court on June 7. Hu Anming has pleaded not guilty. In a court filing, his lawyer, Philip Lomonaco, said the Department of Justice “wanted a feather in its cap with an economic espionage case, so they ignored the facts and the law, destroyed the career of a professor with three PhDs in nanotechnology, and now expects the court to follow their narrative”. Prosecutors say he defrauded NASA by failing to disclose that he was also a Professor at the Beijing University of Technology in China. Under federal law, NASA cannot fund or give grant money to Chinese-owned companies or universities. Prosecutors also say a curriculum vitae that Hu Anming submitted when he applied for a tenured faculty position with the university omitted any affiliation with the Beijing University. According to the indictment, NASA wired the University of Tennessee nearly US$60,000 in 2016 and 2017 for a project involving the Jet Propulsion Laboratory at the California Institute of Technology. NASA would pay another US$50,000 in 2019 for a project involving the Marshall Space Flight Centre.

(Comment: The charges are part of a broader Justice Department crackdown against university researchers who conceal their ties to Chinese institutions, with a Harvard chemistry professor arrested in the past on similar charges. Federal officials have asserted that Beijing is intent on stealing intellectual property from colleges and universities in the US.)