The trial of Harvard professor Dr. Charles Lieber, who allegedly concealed his ties to a Chinese university and the Chinese government’s Thousand Talents Program while receiving U.S. government funding, began this week, a possible bellwether for the future of the Justice Department’s China Initiative.

Lieber, the former chairman of the department of chemistry and chemical biology at Harvard University, received $15 million in grant funding from the National Institutes of Health and the Pentagon over the years before being arrested and charged in January 2020 with crimes including false statements. He was hit with a superseding indictment for falsely reporting on income tax returns related to his role as a “strategic scientist” at the Wuhan University of Technology and his lucrative participation in the Thousand Talents Program. The DOJ says the Chinese program is “designed to attract, recruit, and cultivate high-level scientific talent in furtherance of China’s scientific development, economic prosperity, and national security.”