Wuyuan Lu

Lu Wuyuan is a protein chemist who retired voluntarily from a two-decade tenured career at the University of Maryland School of Medicine to join Shanghai Medical College at Fudan University in 2020, following an NIH investigation into his undisclosed research affiliations in China.

Lu earned his PhD in biochemistry from Purdue University in 1994, trained as a postdoctoral fellow at the Scripps Research Institute, and briefly worked as a research assistant professor at the University of Chicago before joining the University of Maryland faculty in 2000. He achieved tenure as a full professor in 2009 and went on to serve as Associate Director of the university's Institute of Human Virology (IHV) and Director of its Basic Science Division, with research focused on cancer and infectious diseases.

According to Science magazine, published March 23, 2023, for decades Chinese-born US faculty like Lu were celebrated for fostering scientific collaborations with colleagues in China, seen as enriching the research community. That changed in late 2018, when institutions began receiving emails from the National Institutes of Health asking them to investigate whether faculty had violated NIH policy by failing to disclose Chinese affiliations — the start of a wide-reaching investigation that led to 103 scientists, many of them tenured, losing their jobs within four years (a figure that had grown to 112 by June 2024).

Lu was caught in the crosshairs in December 2018, when a senior university research administrator forwarded him NIH concerns about his undisclosed ties to Xi'an Jiaotong University and Fudan University, alleging his NIH-funded research overlapped with work in China. Lu responded that his China collaborations were purely academic, that NIH funds were never used for overseas work, and that the university itself had approved and publicly celebrated the partnerships. His response was met with 15 months of silence before NIH demanded further documentation, including English and Chinese copies of his contracts with Chinese institutions.

In August 2020, after years of uncertainty and what he described as an unjustified "witch hunt," Lu resigned from his tenured position and relocated to China to join Fudan's medical school in Shanghai. He has since described the NIH's conduct as bullying and a form of racial profiling connected to the broader campaign against alleged Chinese espionage, saying the university itself was ultimately just the middleman caught between NIH's demands and its faculty. He has since told CNN that overseas-educated scientists returning to China represents a "robust trend, perhaps an irreversible one," noting a clear surge in job applicants from overseas at Chinese universities.