Chinese researcher at Indiana University pleads guilty to smuggling biological materials

A Chinese post-doctoral researcher at Indiana University was sentenced to more than four months in prison after pleading guilty to smuggling biological materials into the U.S. from China. 

Youhuang Xiang, 33, who is no longer a researcher at the university, is a citizen of the People's Republic of China, according to a Justice Department release. In addition to the prison time, Xiang will be fined $500 and serve one year of supervised release after serving his prison sentence. 

Xiang, who holds a Ph.D. from the Chinese Academy of Sciences, received a U.S. J1 visa to perform postdoctoral research in the Department of Biology at the Indiana University Bloomington in 2023. 

The FBI's Indianapolis Division began investigating suspicious shipments from China that were addressed to Xiang, which were labeled as containing women's underwear. The packages were from a company focused on science and technology. 

Xiang was questioned at Chicago O'Hare International Airport about the shipments upon returning from a research trip to the United Kingdom, and he subsequently admitted they contained samples of DNA from E.coli bacteria. 

According to the Justice Department release, Xiang exploited a federally funded grant from the USDA to smuggle the material into the U.S. 

"Such conduct poses a very serious threat to public safety and to the health of our agricultural economy," Tom Wheeler, U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of Indiana, said in a statement. 

Xiang had his J1 visa revoked. It's not clear from the Justice Department release what Xiang was researching. He is no longer listed on the department's website, but an internet archived page describes Xiang's research interest as "recognition specificity in host-pathogen interactions and engineering crop resistance to pathogen."