A prominent Indiana University cybersecurity professor was fired from his job on the same day the FBI and Department of Homeland Security conducted searches on his homes, according to a letter sent to the school by his union on March 31.
The union said Wang XiaoFeng, a professor at the university’s Luddy School of Informatics, Computing and Engineering, was fired on March 28 following a search of two properties associated with him and his wife, Nianli Ma.
Wang had been associate dean for research at the school in Bloomington, Indiana.
According to a letter sent to the university by the Bloomington chapter of the American Association of University Professors, the professor was “summarily terminated” without due process.
“Termination of a tenured faculty member is an action that requires the highest level of scrutiny and due process,” the letter stated. “His appointment was terminated without the required notice and a hearing before the Faculty Board of Review.”
The union said it was aware of news reports indicating that Wang is under investigation by law enforcement.
“While the outcome of those investigations may ultimately bear on Professor Wang’s continued appointment at IU, the mere fact of an investigation or of unadjudicated allegations cannot justify failure to comply with university policies on the part of the administration. It is fundamental that individuals are presumed innocent until proven guilty,” the union said.
It asked the university to revoke Wang’s firing and provide him with due process.
It is not clear why Wang was terminated.
Alex Tanford, an Indiana University professor of law and president of the Bloomington chapter, said that a complaint was filed with the university in mid-February accusing Wang of research misconduct by failing to properly disclose who was principal investigator on a grant application.
The complaint also accused Wang of failing to fully list all co-authors on an article, he said.
It is not clear if the complaint relates to his termination.
Tanford said Wang’s department told the union that Wang had accepted a job elsewhere next year, and normal advanced notice was provided so the school could plan accordingly.
Wang, who studied in China in the 1990s before coming to the United States, had been a professor at Indiana University since 2004.
According to his official biography, Wang is also the Director and Lead PI of the NSF Center for Distributed Confidential Computing (CDCC), and the Chair of ACM Special Interest Group on Security, Audit and Control (SIGSAC). He has been the principal investigator on research projects totaling nearly $23 million.
Wang has received numerous awards for his work, including the PET Award for outstanding research in privacy enhancing technologies, among others.
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