Indiana University terminated professor Xiaofeng Wang on Friday, the same day that two of his homes were searched by the FBI, according to a document sent by the American Association of University Professors’ IU Bloomington chapter.
The document, IU Provost Rahul Shrivastav’s email informing Wang of his termination, said it was Shrivastav’s understanding that Wang had accepted a faculty position with a university in Singapore. Shrivastav said in the email that Wang would not be eligible to be hired again at IU.
The email also told Wang he needed to return all IU property to the IU Police Department as soon as possible. IUPD did not respond to a request for comment by publication.
The Indiana Daily Student reached out to IU to confirm the document’s veracity, to which a spokesperson responded that IU will not comment on the investigation.
“Indiana University was recently made aware of a federal investigation of an Indiana University faculty member,” an IU spokesperson told the IDS on Monday. “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 not given further information on the nature of the searches of the two homes belonging to the professor and IU Libraries analyst Nianli Ma.
“The FBI conducted court authorized law enforcement activity at the home on Xavier Court in Bloomington Friday,” FBI spokesperson Chris Bavender said over a text message Saturday. “It was related to the FBI activity at the home in Carmel. We have no further comment at this time.”
The FBI searched their homes in Bloomington and Carmel on Friday. The search took nearly all day in Bloomington according to neighbors who spoke with the Indiana Daily Student. Neighbors said they didn’t know Wang or Ma well — several said they didn’t see the couple much, especially not in recent weeks.
Wang, a Luddy School of Informatics, Computing, and Engineering professor, and Ma had their pages scrubbed on IU’s websites as of Monday.
Neither could be reached by the IDS for comment.
Wang had been a director at IU’s center for Security and Privacy in Informatics, Computing, and Engineering. The center's co-director, L. Jean Camp, confirmed details first reported by the South China Morning Post that Wang is still in the United States, and that to her knowledge he has not been charged with anything.
A search on the U.S. government’s Public Access To Court Electronic Records system yielded no recent results for either Wang or Ma. Searches for both in a database of federal prison inmates and Immigration and Customs Enforcement detainees also did not return results.
An archived version Wang’s page on the Luddy website described him as an associate dean for research. According to the archived page, he had served on projects totaling nearly $23 million by 2022. He joined the university in 2004.
According to the SPICE website, Wang’s research focuses on system security and data privacy, specializing on security issues relating to mobile and cloud computing, and human genomic data.
Other colleagues have not responded to requests for comment as of publication.
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