Rice University Wins NSF Grant to Run First National Survey of Research Security

The research enterprise in the United States has always depended on openness. Discoveries move quickly when scientists can share findings, questions and feedback across departmental, institutional and national boundaries, and the digital age has accelerated that exchange to an extraordinary degree. Yet the same tools that make collaboration nearly effortless have also raised the possibility that sensitive information can be transferred without permission and for purposes that have nothing to do with advancing knowledge. Universities across the country are now wrestling with how to build research security programs that address those risks without severing the international connections on which modern science depends. A new effort led from Houston aims to replace guesswork in that debate with hard data.

Rice University has received a grant from the U.S. National Science Foundation to conduct the first national survey designed to quantify the scope and frequency of foreign influence in American higher education. The project will be led by Tam Dao, Rice’s associate vice president of public safety and research security, and Kenny Evans, a fellow in science, technology and innovation policy at Rice’s Baker Institute of Public Policy. They will work in collaboration with Randolph T. Stevenson, the Radoslav Tsanoff Professor of Public Affairs at Rice, and co-principal investigator Claudia Neuhauser, vice president and vice chancellor for research at the University of Houston. Together, the team intends to produce policy recommendations that balance security requirements against the importance of global scientific collaboration.

The project responds directly to a string of well-publicized incidents that have driven a rapid expansion of research security regulation at federal and state levels. Dao brings an unusual perspective to the question: before moving into university administration, he served as the lead FBI special agent on many of the investigations that generated those headlines beginning in 2015. In his view, the regulatory response has outpaced the evidence base. There have been a few high-profile cases that prompted increased requirements for research security on federally and state funded research programs, he noted, but the research community currently lacks an understanding of the actual depth and breadth of the issue, which he argues is essential to forming well-informed, well-reasoned policies.

The policy environment shifted sharply in 2018, when the U.S. Department of Justice launched an initiative to identify undue foreign influence in the academic research enterprise. The initiative produced several prominent prosecutions and prompted universities to adopt new disclosure requirements, export control practices and compliance structures. But a striking feature of the episode, noted by observers across the research policy community, is that very few of the cases involved espionage in any conventional sense. The initiative and the research security policies that followed instead created widespread uncertainty about how researchers could appropriately collaborate with colleagues in other countries. Dao has carried these concerns into the policy arena itself, testifying before two state legislative committees reviewing the implementation of a recently passed research security bill in Texas.

For university research administrators, the uncertainty is not an abstraction. Neuhauser emphasized that universities need clarity in research security policies, and that such clarity can only come from a better understanding of what foreign influence actually looks like in practice. The central empirical question, as she framed it, is whether the country is seeing isolated incidents, indicators of a larger systemic problem, or something in between. Without that baseline, institutions are left calibrating their responses to anecdote and political pressure rather than to measured risk, and the resulting policies may be either too permissive or needlessly restrictive.

Evans pointed to the cumulative cost of that ambiguity for the research system itself. Universities are spending an enormous amount of time and resources working to comply with federal policy, he observed, and the rules continue to change. In his assessment, the research community does not currently understand how new research security policies are affecting the health and competitiveness of the U.S. research enterprise. Research institutions, he argued, need clear guidelines that reflect the scale and scope of research security issues on campuses, because until reliable data exist, no one really knows how big the problem is. That gap between regulation and evidence is precisely what the NSF-funded survey is designed to close.

Methodologically, the project represents a significant departure from previous attempts to assess the issue, which have typically relied on case counts, administrative data or small convenience samples. The Rice-led team will conduct a national survey measuring the frequency with which researchers across American academia have encountered foreign influence tactics. The instrument will probe whether scientists in a range of disciplines have experienced coercion, deception, intellectual property theft or inappropriate rewards, categories drawn from the definitions used in federal research security guidance. Because the survey will ask faculty to disclose potentially sensitive and professionally risky experiences, capturing accurate and representative responses is the central technical challenge of the design.

That challenge is where Stevenson’s expertise becomes central. A political methodologist, he specializes in survey design for contexts in which respondents may be hesitant to answer honestly, a well-recognized problem in research on sensitive topics ranging from electoral fraud to corruption. The Rice survey will be built on a version of the crosswise model developed by Stevenson and his collaborator Yuki Atsusaka in 2021. Crosswise techniques ask respondents to answer a sensitive question jointly with an unrelated question whose prevalence is known, so that no individual response ever reveals a potentially damaging answer while aggregate estimates can still be recovered statistically. The approach is intended to reduce the incentive to misreport that plagues direct questioning about sensitive behavior.

Stevenson described the planned instrument as rigorous, validated and crosscutting, and argued that the survey represents the first step toward developing well-informed research security policies. Because it will be the first serious national measurement of the phenomenon, he said, it is critical that the team use every tool at its disposal to obtain accurate, representative information. If the project succeeds, the resulting estimates will give federal agencies, state legislatures and university administrators something they have never had: a data-driven picture of how often foreign influence tactics actually occur, in which fields, and at what scale.

The stakes extend well beyond a single dataset. Federal agencies have imposed increasingly detailed research security requirements on grant recipients, and states have begun passing their own statutes, creating a patchwork of obligations that institutions must navigate. Proponents of stricter controls argue that even a low-frequency threat can cause disproportionate harm when it targets strategically important technologies. Critics counter that broad restrictions risk chilling legitimate international collaboration, deterring foreign-born scientists and eroding American scientific leadership. The Rice-University of Houston team hopes its findings will allow that debate to proceed from evidence rather than assumption, and the project’s stated aim is to translate rigorous measurement into sensible and effective policy development for a research system that cannot function without global partnership.

News Publication Date: 10-Sep-2026

Web References: https://www.eurekalert.org/news-releases/1143520

References: Rice to lead first national research security survey, https://www.eurekalert.org/news-releases/1143520

Subject of Research: The first national survey to quantify the scope and frequency of foreign influence in U.S. higher education research

Article Title: Rice to lead first national research security survey

Article References: Rice to lead first national research security survey. (n.d.). Original publication

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Keywords: research security, foreign influence, Rice University, National Science Foundation, national survey, crosswise model, international collaboration, research policy, higher education, intellectual property, survey methodology, compliance