MIT Professor Gung Chen is kind of a big deal in the world of nanotechnology.

He was chair of the Mechanical Engineering Department at MIT.

His specialty involves studying how heat moves through very small materials.

We're talking about like a thousand of a width of a human hair level.

Professor colleague Arunavish Winatha.

At MIT, Chen helps set up a research collaboration with another university in China called Sustech.

In January 2020, he visited there with a group of students.

But when Chen flew home from China into Boston's Logan Airport, something unexpected happened.

He's going through customs and border protection agents, pull him over for a secondary inspection,

and search his baggage, and take his two phones and a computer and start asking him some

questions about what he was doing in China.

Chen said that this was just a routine academic trip with students.

But the agents had more questions.

And they kind of pressed him.

These agents keep pressing him on what exactly are these meetings that you were doing in China.

And he just says they were a part of a collaboration.

And they press him on that and ask him what kind of collaboration,

and he just responds to collaboration is a collaboration.

And then he tells them that all of his research is conducted in the United States.

Eventually, the customs agents let Chen leave the airport.

But that wasn't the end of it.

So the agents write up a report of this interview.

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