The Justice Department indicted a Chinese-born Illinois college professor on two counts of wire fraud and a false statements charge for secretly working for a Chinese government-affiliated university and concealing those ties when applying for and receiving a $151,099 grant from the U.S. government’s National Science Foundation.
Mingqing Xiao, 59, was accused on Wednesday of “fraudulently” obtaining the federal grant money “by concealing support he was receiving from the Chinese government and a Chinese university” while he worked as a mathematics professor at Southern Illinois University Carbondale, where he has been employed since 2000. Prosecutors said Xiao “applied for and received NSF grant funds … without informing NSF about another, overlapping grant he had already received from the Natural Science Foundation of Guangdong Province, China” and “failed to inform NSF that he was on the payroll” of Shenzhen University.
