Feng "Franklin" Tao

On April 7, 2022, Tao was convicted by a jury of "three counts of wire fraud and one count of false statements" for not disclosing the contract on conflict of interest forms.

On September 20, 2022, a federal judge threw out the three convictions of wire fraud, leaving the count of making false statements on a form. The judge ruled that prosecutors had not provided sufficient evidence to prove the wire fraud convictions.

In 2019, the United States Department of Justice indicted Tao for 'failing to disclose conflict of interest with a Chinese university', as the first case of its China Initiative. The evidence used by the Department of Justice was obtained after Tao was reported to the FBI for alleged espionage by a vengeful co-author, who presented manufactured evidence to the FBI. Based on this evidence, the FBI obtained a search warrant. Tao was subsequently indicted for an email regarding a contract to teach in China, but not for alleged espionage. Tao and his lawyer have rebutted the accusations, claiming that the contract was neither signed nor accepted by Tao. Using a GoFundMe campaign and loans from family members, Tao and his family raised "hundreds of thousands of dollars" to fund their defense.

Feng "Franklin" Tao (born August 28, 1971) is a chemical engineer who has been a Miller Associate Professor at the University of Kansas since 2014. His research areas of specialization are heterogeneous catalysis, energy chemistry, nanoscience and surface science. He has published over 180 papers in international journals. He received the National Science Foundation Career Award by the Chemical Catalysis Program for research and became a fellow of the Royal Society of Chemistry in 2013.