Arkansas scientist gets 1-year sentence in case stemming from China Initiative

Simon Ang was sentenced to one year and one day in prison for lying to the FBI. He was fined several thousand dollars. Ang, a former engineering professor at the University of Arkansas, was ordered to report to federal prison on 20 July, after which he will be on supervised release for a year.

Our original story was published on January 21st.

A professor at the University of Arkansas pleaded guilty to a charge of lying to the FBI. The U.S. government agreed to stop prosecuting him for hiding his ties to China on federal grant applications.

Simon Ang is one of two dozen academic scientists who have been prosecuted under the government's 3-year-old China Initiative, an effort critics say has unfairly targeted scientists of Chinese descent by trying to enforce ambiguous rules about what scientists need to disclose about their research activities The charges against Gang Chen, a professor of mechanical engineering at the MIT, were dropped yesterday.

The China Initiative is a misguided strategy that has deviated far from its original goals, according to the lawyer for Ang. Suppressing collaborative research at academic institutions is counter productive.

The trial for Ang was scheduled to start next month. The Department of Justice didn't say why it agreed to dismiss most of the charges.

Ang was denied a co-inventorship on several Chinese patents when the FBI interviewed him after his arrest, according to the agreement. It will likely be several months before the judge imposes a sentence, and that the duration was chosen because anyone sentenced to more than a year may be released early.

The FBI was looking into Ang's patent history and his interactions with U.S. research agencies to see if he had violated the university's rules regarding conflict of interest and outside employment. The university was aware of Ang's activities as he was serving as a chief technical adviser to his brother's company. There was no monetary value to the patents.

Ang was fired from his job at the university 2 months after he was arrested.