Harvard Professor Charles Lieber Found Guilty of Six Counts Related to China Payments

Mr. Lieber, who holds joint appointments in Harvard University’s chemistry and engineering departments and is a renowned expert in the field of nanoscience, was accused of lying to government investigators about his participation in the Chinese government’s Thousand Talents program aimed at wooing foreign experts. He also was charged with failing to disclose cash payments from the program on his income tax returns and concealing the existence of a Chinese bank account.

The verdict, returned after less than three hours of deliberations, marks a stunning fall for Mr. Lieber, who came under scrutiny by federal investigators over an academic partnership with the Wuhan University of Technology that dates back a decade. Prosecutors showed documentary evidence that Mr. Lieber had signed a Thousand Talents agreement with Wuhan that paid him hundreds of thousands of dollars—some in cash and some deposited into a Chinese bank account.

The Wuhan school also had appointed Mr. Lieber as director of the WUT-Harvard Joint Nano Key Laboratory, a lab that Harvard officials said they had no knowledge of and hadn’t approved as a collaborator. Harvard later asked Wuhan to remove the school’s name from the collaboration, and Harvard employees testified at trial that Mr. Lieber hadn’t followed the process needed to establish a collaboration.

Mr. Lieber’s legal team argued that the professor’s conduct was sloppy but not criminal and that the government lacked key pieces of evidence needed to prove the charges.

Write to Byron Tau at byron.tau@wsj.com and Aruna Viswanatha at Aruna.Viswanatha@wsj.com