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Texas A and M's associate head of graduate chemistry quietly resigned last spring and then resurfaced in a leadership role at a Chinese government funded lab, which a research security specialist says is a failure of basic oversight. The specialist, Alan Phelps, traced years of deep ties between Doctor Lei Fong and Chinese institutions, including extensive travel, a visiting post at a defense linked university, and a Texas A and M patent he licensed to a Chinese company he co founded. Phelps also documented that Fong held sensitive U. S. Federal grants and reviewed American research proposals, giving him insider access to cutting edge, taxpayer funded work. Phelps argues that combination of sensitive access, foreign appointments, and Chinese commercial entrants should have triggered alarms long before Fong left College Station. He calls Texas A and M's handling of the case a systemic institutional failure to enforce required research security standards and monitor foreign collaborations on basic research. Texas lawmakers recently created a higher education research security council, but Phelps warns that unless universities actually scrutinize their own faculty, hostile regimes will keep treating American campuses as soft targets. To read more about this story, go to texasscorecard.com.