Their mother was Jane Wu, a Chinese American neuroscientist at Northwestern University whose lab was abruptly shut down in May 2024 following a government investigation into her research activities and ties to China. Wu was never charged, and she died by suicide at 60 years old just months later.
Her family recently filed a lawsuit against the school alleging that Northwestern discriminated against Wu even though she was cleared by shutting down her lab, forcing her into a psychiatric facility against her will and ultimately leading her to take her own life. Wu’s court records do not show any related charges.
Her daughter, Elizabeth Rao, is now speaking to the media for the first time amid the one-year anniversary of Wu’s death. Rao talked about her mother’s legacy and addressed the lawsuit that she hopes will result in the fair treatment of scholars like her mother.
“As painful as it is for us as her family to recount how Northwestern treated her, we are seeking justice to prevent this from happening again to others in the future,” Rao said.
Wu, a neuroscientist, had a nearly 40-year career including nearly two decades at Northwestern, according to the complaint, which said her lab researched tumor development and metastasis, in addition to efforts to fight neurodegenerative diseases. A naturalized citizen, Wu lived in Chicago, enjoyed a wide variety of music ranging from Tanya Tucker to Taiwanese pop musician Teresa Teng and loved spending time with her two children.
In 2019, the National Institutes of Health, a federal medical research agency that operates under the Department of Health and Human services, investigated Wu for any contacts related to China as part of a larger agency effort to investigate foreign influence at U.S. grantee institutions. Her work included “occasional international contacts” in China in addition to Argentina, Britain, Canada and more, the lawsuit said.
While there were never any charges, Northwestern made efforts to limit her from working during the probe, the suit said. And when the investigation failed to turn up any revelations, the school still continued to punish her, the suit said.
“NU did nothing to support her nor help lift the racial stigma placed over Dr. Wu despite her obvious innocence and the enormous funding her work had brought to NU,” the lawsuit said.
The Wu family suit, filed on June 23, says that the school’s treatment of Wu, including its alleged efforts to oust her, her physical eviction from her office and forced hospitalization, was a “substantial and decisive factor in her decision to end her life.” The estate is seeking an unspecified amount in compensatory and punitive damages.
Northwestern told NBC News in an email that its heart goes out to the family, but it “vehemently denies” the allegations in the suit.
The school “plans to file a motion to dismiss it before our next pleading is due in early September,” the university said. The school declined to provide further details on specific allegations.
The suit says that even though there was no evidence of wrongdoing, the school still took action against Wu following the NIH investigation. Northwestern did not address its interactions with NIH.
NIH faced backlash for alleged racial profiling after it began sending letters to universities in 2018 asking them to investigate hundreds of grant recipients, mostly those with collaborators in China. The letters were part of an effort by NIH to thwart the theft of biomedical research and intellectual property by other countries. Lawmakers in 2020 launched a probe into the agency as well as the FBI for their investigations of scientists of Asian descent.
While NIH has said that most but not all scientists who were being investigated were of Chinese descent, the agency denied racial profiling.
“This is not xenophobic racism, this is not targeting and this is not stigma. This is real theft,” Dr. Michael Lauer, NIH deputy director for extramural research, said of the agency’s investigations into Asian scientists that showed instances of withholding information about funding sources.
At the time, under the Department of Justice’s China Initiative, a number of scholars of Chinese descent across the country had been accused of espionage, including MIT’s Gang Chen in 2021, University of Tennessee, Knoxville’s Anming Hu in 2020 and Qing Wang formerly of the Cleveland Clinic that same year. All three were later acquitted. While the NIH investigations were not formally part of the China Initiative, they drew similar criticisms of discrimination.
The Wu estate suit alleges Northwestern discriminated against her during the investigation by limiting her work, partly closing her lab space, breaking up her research team and reassigning her grants to white, male faculty colleagues and isolating her. During a meeting with university leadership in which Wu was being told about the investigation, she was asked to write a “narrative related to activities in China,” the lawsuit said.
The family accused the school of racial discrimination because the university had already approved of her interactions in China and her work was public domain, the lawsuit said.Still, the school sought to limit Wu’s work even after the investigation had concluded and continued efforts to isolate her, the lawsuit said.
When the investigation ended in 2023, the university placed “even stronger restrictions to block Dr. Wu’s return to her funded scientific work,” the lawsuit said. Among them, the dean of the university’s Feinberg School of Medicine, where Wu taught, cut her salary and raised new requirements she had to meet to restore her funded status, the suit said.
Months later, the school continued efforts to block Wu’s work, and by May, administrators shut down her lab entirely “without explanation,” the complaint said.
The ordeal had contributed to signs of depression and obsessive behavior in Wu as she attempted to protect her life’s work, the complaint said. She also suffered from a loss of vision as a result of a stroke she had under the stress of the investigation, the lawsuit said. But she was still able to work. The school used her emotional disability as a “pretext” to evict her, and in late May, Northwestern sent law enforcement to remove her and place her in handcuffs, the lawsuit said. The school then forcibly admitted her to the psychiatric unit of the Northwestern Memorial Hospital without notifying loved ones or consulting outside doctors, the lawsuit said.
Northwestern declined to comment about specific allegations, including those around salary, law enforcement and psychiatric treatment.
“The physical assault directed by NU and the forced hospitalization sent Dr. Wu into a severe state of shock,” the complaint said.
Two weeks after her release from the hospital, Wu took her own life, the lawsuit said.
In December 2024, NIH released a statement acknowledging that its efforts to protect against concerning activities from China “have had the consequence of creating a difficult climate for our valued Asian American, Asian immigrant and Asian research colleagues who may feel targeted and alienated.”
Wu’s story has drawn support from a number of members of the scientific community in addition to groups like the Asian American Scholar Forum, which condemned the school’s treatment of the late scientist.
“Universities must be places of community, support, and fairness, not fear and coercion,” said Gisela Perez Kusakawa, executive director of the Asian American Scholar Forum, in a statement on Wu’s death.
For Rao, many of her best memories are of Wu as a parent. She described her mother as the opposite of the strict and demanding “tiger mom” stereotype. Throughout Rao’s childhood, the family lived in St. Louis, Nashville and then Chicago, she said. And in each of those cities, Wu “turned simple houses into warm homes.”
Rao said she and her mother would hold hands and watch movies or immerse themselves in the quiz show “Wait Wait… Don’t Tell Me!” The two would also sing along to tunes during long drives, she said.
“She made sure that my brother and I had got not only a great education but also got to do all the stuff of a quintessential American childhood. Sports, road trips, dance classes, choir, you name it,” Rao said.
Rao said that her mother also left her family with a lesson.
“We carry this with us: her upstanding morals and conviction to fight against injustice,” she said.
