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The instigator
A single FBI agent spurred NIH’s campaign against foreign intervention on U.S. campuses. Now, he’s studying the extent of the problem 22 Oct 2026
2:00 PM ET
ByJeffrey MervisGo to content
Former FBI counterintelligence agent Tam Dao now works on research security at Rice University. Jared Jones/Rice University
A version of this story appeared in Science, Vol 394, Issue 6822.Download PDF
The National Institutes of Health (NIH) has spent the past decade compiling information on hundreds of U.S.-based scientists it believes tried to illegally help their country of origin, most often China. But it’s never been clear what triggered NIH’s aggressive pursuit of these scientists, many of whom eventually lost their jobs or even went to jail, and why it was so much more extensive than efforts at other federal agencies.
Mystery solved. Science has learned that Tam Dao, an academic psychologist–turned–FBI special agent for counterintelligence, laid the groundwork for NIH’s campaign. “I led the investigation that started all this,” Dao says, acknowledging for the first time his pivotal role as the United States competes with China for global leadership in science.
Dao remains an important player in the debate over research security. Now head of campus safety and research security at Rice University, he will be tackling a question that arguably should have been asked before NIH plunged ahead: How often do foreign governments try to steal research at U.S. universities?
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“Tam brought [the problem] to our attention,” agrees Michael Lauer, former head of NIH’s extramural research program, referring to several meetings starting in 2014 in which Dao told senior NIH officials he believed scientists at the MD Anderson Cancer Center had violated the confidentiality of the NIH peer-review process to benefit colleagues at Chinese institutions. “He had copies of their emails, text messages, and computers, which obviously we didn’t have access to,” Lauer recalls.
Dao’s investigation of MD Anderson, which resulted in the firing of three scientists of Asian descent in 2019, was one of hundreds of counterintelligence cases Dao handled during his 11 years at FBI’s Houston field office, from 2012 to ’23. His efforts were part of a broader push by the U.S. government called the China Initiative, begun in 2018 during President Donald Trump’s first term to root out espionage. And he convinced NIH there was a serious problem it needed to address.
Spurred on by what Dao had compiled and shared, Lauer assembled his own team to ferret out more information on questionable practices, including a failure to disclose foreign ties. That led to hundreds of U.S. universities getting letters from Lauer asking them to investigate one or more faculty members holding NIH grants and take appropriate action. The effort grew over the next few years, and as of June NIH says it has found 238 cases of undisclosed affiliations, including 197 instances of unreported grant support. As a result, 122 scientists have lost their jobs and 216 have been banned as peer reviewers.
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While NIH’s probes continued, the Department of Justice (DOJ), FBI’s parent agency, ended the China Initiative in 2022 under then-President Joe Biden after acknowledging that many people believed it had unfairly targeted scientists of Chinese descent. And Dao’s feelings about its methods and its impact are nuanced.
“I spent my whole [academic] career developing mental health inventories that don’t overdiagnose or are biased against Asian Americans,” he says. “So any accusation of targeting Asian Americans hits me at the core.”
He agrees with critics that the China Initiative damaged the reputations of many innocent scientists and “deterred good people from coming to the U.S.” But he also thinks it “has helped the country more than it has hurt the country by deterring bad people from coming here … and making the country safer.” And he strongly defends the government’s tactics.
“I’m pretty sure there are people out there who are racist and will target [those of Asian descent],” he says. “But the FBI looks at the behavior, not the ethnicity, of an individual, and that behavior has to provide what we call reasonable, articulable facts to support a case.”
Dao’s personal history makes him both an unlikely candidate—and a perfect fit—to influence government policy on research security. Born in what was then Saigon on 5 April 1975, he and his family were evacuated just days before the city fell to the North Vietnamese on 30 April. “We were told to go to a certain place at a certain time,” Dao recalls learning from his father, a translator for the U.S. government.
Housed temporarily in a relocation center at Fort Chaffee in Arkansas, Dao’s family eventually ended up in Houston, where they struggled to make ends meet. His parents worked minimum-wage jobs, and during the summers he and his three brothers fended for themselves. “Today that would be considered child abuse,” Dao says. But his parents “had no choice.”
They also put a priority on education. Following in the footsteps of his two older brothers, Dao graduated from the University of Texas (UT) at Austin. After 2 years at a well-paid but unfulfilling job managing real estate, the desire to make a bigger contribution to society led him back to school and a Ph.D. in counseling psychology from Florida State University. In 2009, he joined the faculty of the University of Houston, where he specialized in personality assessments.
His department was willing to sponsor him for tenure after only 3 years, Dao says, but he felt it was time to show his appreciation for “everything this country has done for my family.” He applied for an FBI job, even though he lacked training in law enforcement—“I didn’t even know how to shoot a gun”—and was beyond the age limit of 37 for new agents. He received an age waiver, survived the grueling boot camp, and was assigned to the Houston FBI office in 2012. After a few years he moved into counterintelligence, investigating whether U.S.-based academic scientists might be helping foreign entities illegally acquire research funded by the U.S. government.
One of his first counterintelligence cases involved MD Anderson, part of the UT system. But when Dao presented his findings to then–NIH Director Francis Collins; his top deputy, Lawrence Tabak; and Lauer, “we were all rather skeptical that there was any problem,” Lauer recalls. Dao says: “They said I was not credible, and that NIH-funded scientists had been trained not to do those things.”
A major reason for that skepticism was what Lauer calls “a culture gap” between the two agencies. “The kind of people who work for the FBI … come from very different backgrounds and have different perspectives about how the world works,” he explains. “And we’re not used to dealing with them.”
Dao wanted to bridge that gap using the currency of science: evidence. He got permission to share with NIH the information he and other FBI agents had amassed—an unusual approach that Dao says required months of delicate negotiations with his bosses.
The research on mental health assessments that Dao had carried out also established some common ground with the NIH officials. “He had been applying various modern statistical techniques to problems that were similar to the statistical techniques I had been using when I was studying cardiovascular disease,” recalls Lauer, who worked at the Cleveland Clinic before coming to NIH in 2007. “So there was a connection. He’s also a really nice person.”
Any accusation of targeting Asian Americans hits me at the core.Tam Dao
Rice University
Once NIH leadership had come around to Dao’s conclusion, Collins sent a letter to some 10,000 institutions that NIH funds. Dao helped craft that August 2018 bombshell, which warned that “NIH is aware that some foreign entities have mounted systematic programs to influence NIH researchers and peer reviewers and to take advantage of the long tradition of trust, fairness, and excellence of NIH-supported research activities.”
The subsequent flurry of letters from Lauer sent universities scrambling to investigate possible involvement by their faculty in what NIH labels foreign interference. The phrase encompasses violations of rules that govern peer review or the requirement of grantees to disclose ties to foreign institutions. But many university administrators complained they lacked access to what NIH—through Dao—already knew about their cases. That ignorance, Dao says, contributed to the perception that Asian scientists were being unfairly targeted. He decided once again that what was needed was greater transparency.
“Traditionally, the FBI would do its own investigation [without involving the institutions],” Dao explains. “But when you do that, you’re at risk of bias. I didn’t like that approach. So I started to give them the classified stuff. I would say, ‘Here it is. You decide whether you have a problem.’” Dao estimates he held such briefings for more than 300 universities and medical centers during his FBI years.
He believes sharing FBI information with institutions has improved research security on campus. One important ingredient, he says, is bringing in faculty with the expertise to decide whether a breach, if it had occurred, could pose a threat to national security. Dao says his FBI colleagues don’t possess such expertise.
“Most agents are trying to protect something that they don’t even understand,” Dao explains. “For example, what aspects of quantum pose a national security risk? Most FBI agents would have no idea. Neither do I, for that matter.”
To many politicians from both parties, the MD Anderson case was all the proof they needed that academic institutions weren’t doing enough to combat the perceived threat. A steady stream of DOJ press releases touting the indictments of individuals or settlements with institutions in cases involving so-called “malign foreign influences” suggested the problem was huge—and growing. But many of the cases involving academics were later dropped or ended in losses by the government.
Dao’s current project, funded last month by the National Science Foundation (NSF), is the first rigorous attempt to quantify the problem. It’s part of NSF’s new Research on Research Security Program, mandated by a 2022 law giving the agency increased responsibility for improving research security at U.S. universities and academic medical centers.
Dao and his team hope to survey as many as 1600 faculty members, divided into STEM—science, technology, engineering, and math—or non-STEM fields and by whether their institution conducts more or less than $50 million a year in research. Those distinctions could be important, Dao says. “What if the rate among non-STEM faculty is much higher?” he asks. “Or what if we learn that the problem is rare at most top-ranked institutions?”
The study will use a definition of foreign influence that covers four types of inappropriate behavior by foreign governments: offering incentives or rewards, demanding that any collaboration remain secret, coercing scientists to participate, and the outright theft of intellectual property. Dao says the survey methodology can collect accurate information about the type and frequency of any questionable behavior without linking the answers to an individual respondent. However, he acknowledges that the chilling effect of the China Initiative could make faculty less willing to report any contacts, much less any missteps.
Dao hopes the results of his survey, to be fielded in the coming months, will address what he sees as two flaws in the current political debate over foreign influence. One is an inherent bias among law enforcement agencies to inflate the problem because they see so many examples of possibly illegal behavior. The second is the reluctance of scientists to consider that their peers are capable of such misconduct.
Dao promises to avoid both tendencies. “People who know me know that I’m driven by data,” he says.
Lauer, for one, trusts Dao to be able to walk that fine line and establish a baseline for foreign influence on U.S. campuses. “Tam is an extraordinarily capable person, and he is quantitatively oriented,” Lauer says. “So I think he would be the obvious person to attempt to answer the question.”
doi: 10.1126/science.zr9p2fz
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Jeffrey Mervis
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