A department chair whose laboratory held more than $15 million in American federal grants took a second salary from a Chinese university, kept it in a Chinese bank account, and did not declare it. That is the case. It is a money story, and it is why he is on this site.
A jury convicted him on 21 December 2021, after a six-day trial, on six counts:
Not espionage. Not economic spying. Not theft of research. His arrangement with Wuhan University of Technology and the Thousand Talents Plan was not itself illegal; lying to the federal government about it was.
| Source | What the record shows |
|---|---|
| Harvard / federal grants | His lab, the Lieber Research Group, received more than $15 million in federal research grants between 2008 and 2019, from the Department of Defense and the National Institutes of Health. [IRS Criminal Investigation] |
| Wuhan University of Technology — salary | Up to $50,000 per month under his Thousand Talents contract. [IRS Criminal Investigation] |
| Wuhan University of Technology — expenses | Up to $150,000 in living expenses. [IRS Criminal Investigation] |
| Wuhan University of Technology — laboratory | More than $1.5 million to establish a research laboratory at WUT. [IRS Criminal Investigation] |
| Where it went | In 2012 he and WUT officials opened a Chinese bank account. From about 2013 to 2015, WUT deposited part of his salary into it. [IRS Criminal Investigation] |
| What he did not declare | He did not report the WUT income on his 2013 and 2014 tax returns, and filed no foreign bank account reports for 2014 or 2015. [IRS Criminal Investigation] |
| When | What happened |
|---|---|
| 2008–2019 | The Lieber Research Group receives more than $15m in federal grants. [IRS Criminal Investigation] |
| 2011 | Prosecutors say he became a “strategic scientist” at Wuhan University of Technology. [Snopes] |
| 2012–2015 | Contractual participant in China's Thousand Talents Plan. [IRS Criminal Investigation] |
| 2012 | A Chinese bank account is opened with WUT officials. [IRS Criminal Investigation] |
| 2013–2015 | WUT deposits part of his salary into that account. [IRS Criminal Investigation] |
| 2018 | Makes a false statement to the Department of Defense. [FactCheck.org] |
| January 2019 | Makes a false statement to the National Institutes of Health. [FactCheck.org] |
| 28 January 2020 | Arrested. The case is announced as part of the Justice Department's China Initiative. [Snopes] |
| Within days | False claims spread online that he had created or sold the coronavirus. Fact-checkers debunk them. [FactCheck.org] |
| 21 December 2021 | Convicted on all six counts after a six-day trial. The jury deliberates under three hours. [The Harvard Crimson] |
| 26 April 2023 | Sentenced to time served, two years supervised release with six months home confinement, a $50,000 fine and $33,600 restitution. [ABC News] |
| 3 April 2025 | An FBI email vetting a different man describes him as a “convicted Chinese spy”. It is later released in the Epstein files. [Los Angeles Magazine] |
Wuhan University of Technology is not the Wuhan Institute of Virology. They are different institutions. WUT is an engineering school — materials science, transportation, logistics. FactCheck.org examined its published research and found no virus work.
A correction worth making carefully, because several fact-checks put it too simply. It is not true that nanoscience and virology do not meet: they meet constantly, in diagnostics, biosensing and delivery. And Lieber's own laboratory worked on viruses. He is the senior author of Electrical detection of single viruses (PNAS, September 2004), which used nanowire transistors coated with influenza A antibodies to identify single virus particles, distinguishing influenza from paramyxovirus and adenovirus.
What follows from that is narrower than it sounds. Building a sensor that recognises a virus is not engineering one, the work is from 2004, and nothing in it or anywhere else connects him to coronaviruses or to the Wuhan Institute of Virology. He is a chemist, not a virologist — but saying he had nothing to do with viruses was wrong, and this page said it until a reader pointed it out.
The false statements he was convicted of were made to the Department of Defense in 2018 and the NIH in January 2019 — both before COVID-19 existed as a known disease. Prosecutors have never alleged he was involved in manufacturing or selling a virus.
A fair question, because Epstein's Harvard access was extensive. Harvard's own 2020 review found he visited campus more than forty times after his 2008 conviction, held an office and a key card at the Program for Evolutionary Dynamics, which he had funded with $6.5m, and used the visits to network with faculty.
But the record does not place Lieber in it. He is not named in Harvard's 2020 review. Epstein's roughly $9m in gifts is recorded as going to the Program for Evolutionary Dynamics and to Psychology, Economics, and Art and Art History; none is recorded reaching Chemistry. A 2020 Department of Education letter does name both men, but in the course of questioning Harvard's controls over foreign and donor money in general, not as a relationship between them.
So: plausible that they crossed paths, given forty visits and deliberate faculty networking. Not documented anywhere we can check. Harvard opened a wider review in 2026 covering anyone named in the released files, and reporting that year says the university's Epstein ties ran deeper than the 2020 review disclosed. If Lieber appears there, this page will say so.
His name is in the released Epstein files. It appears once, in an FBI email of 3 April 2025 vetting the investor Timothy Draper, which mentions Lieber as one of Draper's associates because both belonged to the Foresight Institute. No reporting shows Lieber ever met Jeffrey Epstein, took money from him, or had any relationship with him. That same memo is where the “convicted Chinese spy” description comes from.
How a name ends up in those files →
His was a flagship prosecution of the Justice Department's China Initiative, a programme criticised for sweeping up researchers of Chinese descent and for drifting from its stated purpose. The programme was wound down. That criticism is context for how the case was brought; it does not undo the verdict, which a jury reached in under three hours.