Texas A&M’s associate head of graduate studies of chemistry resigned and returned to his homeland to work at a Chinese government-funded laboratory. A research security specialist called this a security failure on the university’s part.
In October 2025, Yongjiang Laboratory in Ningbo, China, announced that Dr. Lei Fang had taken a leadership position at the lab. Up to that time, he had worked at Texas A&M since 2013 before resigning this spring.
Research security specialist Allen Phelps of IPTalons identified Yongjiang as a Chinese government-funded nonprofit, and part of China’s network of state-backed labs. The U.S. Office of the Director of National Intelligence identified China as a national security threat in its 2025 Annual Threat Assessment.
“From the day I set foot outside the country, I knew I was coming back,” Dr. Fang said, according to a Google translation of the Yongjiang press release. Born in 1983 in Poyang, China, Dr. Fang’s loyalty to his homeland appears to have never left his mind. Despite studying and working in multiple American universities since 2006, Phelps’ research showed Dr. Fang “extensively traveled” to China to attend conferences and give lectures between 2014 to 2020.
In a report he provided to Texas Scorecard, Phelps’ analysis of open source information found a “clear, documented pattern of foreign engagement” that he believes should have alarmed Texas A&M because of his work while employed by them.
For example, Phelps reported that Dr. Fang licensed a Texas A&M-owned U.S. patent to Ningbo Kunpeng Environmental Sci-Tech Co., Ltd., a company Dr. Fang co-founded in 2017. Phelps called this a “stunning conflict of interest.” He added that “this not only raises questions about the proprietary nature of the research but also about whether his primary commitment was to the American taxpayer who funded the underlying science, or to his foreign commercial and academic partners.”
Beyond just Texas A&M, there are national security concerns. “Dr. Fang was not just a professor; he was a recipient of prestigious, sensitive federal grants … that were active up to or beyond his 2025 departure,” Phelps wrote the report.
Dr. Fang was a panelist at the National Defense Science and Engineering Graduate Fellowship in 2016 and 2017, and was a technical reviewer for American research proposals. Phelps wrote this gave Dr. Fang “privileged, non-public access to the cutting-edge research” of competing scientists in America. Phelps wrote that Dr. Fang took this “sensitive information” back with him to help run Yongjiang Lab.
Phelps also noted Dr. Fang’s public resume showed that during the same time he received U.S. federal funding, he had a “Flexible Joint Visiting Professor” position with Nanchang Hangkong University’s Key Laboratory of Jiangxi Province—a Chinese lab known to engage in national defense research.
Dr. Fang joining Yongjiang is another red flag. Phelps reported this lab seems to serve as a central hub for Chinese talent recruitment programs. Such efforts have long been part of China’s infiltration operation of American universities. A February 2020 report from the U.S. House Foreign Affairs Committee sounded the alarm on China’s talent recruitment efforts as a means “to supercharge Chinese innovation at U.S. taxpayers’ expense.”
Research security is a critical issue in American higher education, as universities are part of America’s supply chain of technological development. In this chain, classified research starts as basic fundamental research, or unclassified research, before the work’s applications become clear. Phelps wrote that large institutions like Texas A&M usually focus on guarding classified research projects, which leaves unclassified research projects up for grabs by “Chinese threat actors.” He has previously cautioned that research security is not an academic exercise.
“[T]he loss of taxpayer-funded intellectual property is a matter of national security and institutional compliance,” he wrote. “[Dr. Fang] should have been caught long before deciding to make the move to China.”
How did Texas A&M miss the early warning signs, despite federal mandates for universities to actively oversee and mitigate “foreign influence ‘red flags?’” Phelps believes a main reason “may be lack of monitoring and investigating [of] the foreign collaborations of researchers” working on American taxpayer-funded basic research. He questioned how many more such projects throughout the Texas A&M University System are handled by faculty who are juggling their roles with “strategic, concurrent foreign appointments.”
“This isn’t just about sloppy paperwork; it’s about a systemic, institutional failure to apply required research security standards,” Phelps wrote.
Texas A&M did not respond to a request for comment before publication.
Texas A&M University is a component of the Texas A&M University System, which is governed by a Board of Regents appointed by the governor and confirmed by the Texas Senate.
In 2025, Texas lawmakers passed research security legislation, House Bill 127, that is effective as of September 1. The law creates a Texas Higher Education Research Security Council to oversee university systems’ protections. In a statement to Texas Scorecard, State Rep. Terry Wilson (R–Georgetown), the author of the bill, stated the law “requires all public institutions of higher education in the state of Texas to fully scrutinize the activities of faculty and researchers to find potential security threats.”
He continued that the “bill also increased penalties for theft of trade secrets if the theft was intended to benefit a foreign adversary.”
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