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The former chair of Harvard University’s Department of Chemistry and Chemical Biology who was convicted of lying to the U.S. government about his Chinese connections and Chinese money has retired from the university.
Charles M. Lieber retired from his professor position Feb. 1, the university said. Torrey Young, one of Lieber’s attorneys, told Inside Higher Ed Friday that he chose to retire “after 30 years of devoted service to Harvard.”
Lieber hasn’t yet been sentenced for his December 2021 convictions for knowingly making false statements to the federal government, willfully filing false tax returns and willfully not disclosing that he had authority over a Chinese bank account.
He was set to be sentenced March 2, but that is being rescheduled.
After his conviction, Lieber asked a judge to acquit him or call for a new trial. But Rya W. Zobel, a U.S. District Court judge for the District of Massachusetts, shot down that effort in September.
“From 2011 to 2015, defendant developed a relationship with Wuhan University of Technology (WUT) in China and participated in the Chinese government’s Thousand Talents Program (TTP),” Zobel wrote. “His relationship with WUT, and specifically his participation in the TTP, was the subject of investigations by two U.S. agencies that periodically provided substantial grant money to fund defendant's laboratory and research at Harvard.”
Those agencies were the U.S. Defense Department and the National Institutes of Health.
