Ting Lu

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University: University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Department: Department of Bioengineering
Website: http://lulab.bioen.illinois.edu/
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Anonymous
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This review is reproduced with the permission of the author.

Below is a link of the letter: [Concerns about an Illinois Bioengineering lab](https://drive.google.com/file/d/1G_0nzq5viS6pDTm6BiyRLoXdEbpvMCh-/view)

More links: [LinkedIn post](https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:activity:6916801202127044608/), [Twitter post ](https://twitter.com/WaldenLi1/status/1511062721881595909), [WeChat post](https://mp.weixin.qq.com/s/MZ-vvayqlgtnJ9cN95kk6w)


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To whom this letter reaches:

I’m writing to bring your attention to concerning management behaviors of a UIUC Bioengineering professor. My name is Jinbei Li, or Walden. I defended my PhD thesis in Bioengineering in February, after 6.5 years at Illinois as a grad student. My report will be based mainly on my experiences between 2017 and 2018, when I worked in Dr. Ting Lu’s lab for 1.5 years.

What I will be writing about will be inconvenient for most people who have the power to make a difference. Not to mention that it will be inconvenient for me, given the hierarchical structure of academia, meaning that I will be putting my career at stake by going against people above me. I have had hesitations: maybe things have changed in how he manages his lab since I left (although interactions with later members showed otherwise); maybe I’m limited in my judgments. It certainly took me a lot to start this report. What drove my decision home is two points: 1. Whatever people think or judge, what I will be writing are just facts and truth. Nothing is made up. If so, no one should be scared. (The professor and I came from the same undergrad university, where the school motto is “Pursue Truth”.) I’m no authority in judging what is or isn’t acceptable. But facts I can defend. 2. I decided that it would be unethical for me not to report what I experienced and saw. Many more students and many more research careers will go through his lab. I can do something so that less of them are ruined. Thus I have to.

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**1. The statistics.** I joined that lab at the start of 2017, and left it in August 2018, with my research career almost ruined. Between May 2018 and August 2019, 5 (out of 8) students/postdocs left the lab prematurely. Among the four PhD students who left in that period, I am unfortunately the only one still doing research. From what I know, all these four students were yelled at by the professor in volcanic rage at different points. It was a traumatic experience that I still have great trouble processing.

While he’s been at Illinois as a PI for over 10 years, his lab page does not have an alumni section, likely because way more research careers have been ruined than developed through his lab. From what I know, only two students (happening to be his first ones) on computational work have obtained their PhD degrees from his lab after these years. I do not know how many students have been through this lab. I do know at least the two PhD students on the computational side who left his lab prematurely in just 2018 and 2019; at least four PhD students on the experimental side, including me, who left his lab prematurely just between 2017 and 2019.

Above are the statistics. If nothing else, I hope that alone is enough for serious concern. To quote the idea from my eventual PhD advisor, whom I deeply admire: granting agencies’ investments would be much better spent on developing great engineers and scientists; with that, great research will happen. Most of the students I mentioned, including me, came to grad school with great passion in research. I hope educating and bringing up people is part of our university’s and our department’s goals, and I hope these many people’s research careers being wasted is a concern. Not to mention, the premature departure of students also meant the premature ending to research projects, leading to huge wastes in research funding.

When I asked a student who left the year after me if he was looking to join a different lab, he said he couldn’t think of it. He wrote “my mental health was in shambles near the end there”; “I’m afraid Ting burnt out my passion for research”. Indeed, he looked in deep depression when I met him at the time. He was the opposite a year earlier though, being one of the most passionate and dynamic persons about research at the beginning. It is a tragedy. And it is only one of way too many.

I would have said the same things in that darkest period of my life. I joined Dr. Lu’s lab after switching from Dr. Huimin Zhao’s lab due to my young idealistic passion for the particular areas of research I wanted to work on for my PhD. I am lucky, very lucky, to regain that passion now, but I nearly couldn’t feel it after my time in Dr. Lu’s lab.

**2. Dr. Lu managed the lab with fear and distrust.** There is little ambiguity about this. He uses threat as his major way of driving students. There is little respect to be found in his interactions to students. He appears methodical with his approach: senior students mentioned a general “honeymoon” period when a student first joins; things then certainly turn downhill sharply as time goes on as the stakes become high for students to leave. 

During my time in that lab, Dr. Lu started with “I have high expectations for hard work” – always seen as one of the hardest-working students along my way, I didn’t give it much thought. Little did I know that Dr. Lu’s assumption of students is that they are lazy and can’t be trusted, regardless of whether that’s the opposite of the truth, and regardless of how much they try. Later he specified that he required 60 hours of work per week. I thought I generally work more than that, so no problem for me. Later, when rushing us to make something for a midterm report for a grant (after not doing anything for it for two years as I remember), he asked us to work 9 to 9, 6 days a week, or 72 hours a week. I had no objection as I thought I generally work longer than that anyway, although I may have more flexibility in terms of the schedule. I didn’t know how much terror that meant. After we crossed the mid-term report point, the “996” requirements apparently stayed. 

A Monday evening past 8 pm when I was running a ligation experiment while dropping off something to a friend, I received email from Dr. Lu to two of us that he found we were not in the lab, reading simply, “I meant it, for what I requested in last Friday’s meetings.” 

One Saturday afternoon around 5:30 pm, Dr. Lu dropped in the lab, steps before me. (I was only checking some experiment that afternoon. –Before that, I thought we just needed to have 6 days working in the lab, with the sixth day being either Saturday or Sunday, and I was planning on working Sunday at the time.) Dr. Lu found that most of us were not working in the lab. We received an email immediately, calling on a meeting on Monday, where he stressed how important it is for us to work hard. There I learned that he told the whole lab to work “9 to 6, 5 days a week”, while it was only the wet-lab students, who also happened to be all Chinese students, who were privately asked to work 996. 

After two weeks of working more than 12 hours each day including staying in the lab almost overnight for some nights following bacterial dynamics, I received email from Dr. Lu one evening to two of us, saying “occasionally when I went into the lab, I didn’t see you in the lab. … I would also feel it inappropriate and negative to have you as the models in the lab when new grad students join.” 

We had little life beyond the lab. For me personally, I typically work till 12 am or 1 am at night, while getting to the lab a little over 9 am after struggling to catch enough sleep. The whole time is anxiety: I start the day terrified of whether he would check in the lab before me (he is usually late for 10 am meetings though); if I ever go out of the lab even to buy something from the storeroom, I would be terrified of him finding me not in the lab, and telling me that I’m “failing” (he rarely asked for explanations). I was told by a senior student one day, that the student spent some time discussing research problems with another professor; he was found not in the lab, and asked where he had been. The student said what he did, and Dr. Lu asked him to talk with Dr. Lu first before interacting with other professors. 

Terror was what I lived in. From what I learned later in neuroscience research, unpredictability augments fear and trauma dramatically.

**3. He has little regard for students’ labor.** Examples: 

A. For some time I spent consecutive whole days and nights following bacterial dynamics with a microscope. When this was mentioned to him, he dismissed it with a typical “I think you should”. 

B. He used to have Friday afternoons as meeting times, with me and other students being the last of the evening, and with time ranging from 5 to 9, depending on when it was our turns. We often had no clue when it would be our turn, such that we didn’t dare to go for dinner. On multiple occasions, we would have had no dinner and waited till almost 8:30 pm, when we were told directly or indirectly that he was too tired and our meeting would be moved to Sunday. 

C. He had no hesitation in assigning tasks that would clearly require huge amounts of work, even when better experimental design and technology upgrading would alleviate the need. When an early-phase student explained that they already had a lot of tasks to deal with, he reportedly responded “you are not working 24/7 are you?” 

> On top of that, in both my case and other people’s experiences, he explicitly belittled students and questioned their abilities if experimental results didn’t align with what he expected. 

D. He passes his time management issues to students by having them overwork to the extreme. For grant proposals, manuscript submissions/revision deadlines, paper reviews, he would ask students to work on the tasks the night before the deadline, and have students work with him on call over the night and day. As mentioned, in one case for a governmental grant mid-term report, after two to three years of doing nothing for the grant, he assigned tasks to students less than three months before the deadline, and asked students to work 996 so that he had things to present.

**4. His management of research is sporadic, jumping between micromanagement and complete absence.** For around three times over the 1.5-year period, he was almost absent from research activities in the lab for stretches of over a month each time without prior notice, explanations, or arrangements (hypothesized by lab members as to avoid having us know that he would be absent such that we might be “relaxed” in the lab). In those months, I would prepare important decisions to make in the research projects, to get no response from him in emails, and find our meeting canceled after our regular meeting times. When he did “come back”, he would completely reverse the tracks that I had to take in his absence, without addressing the concerns I had tried to raise. Before I made the decision to leave the lab in Aug. 2018, I spent months to show a dead end as a dead end, which I had pointed out and highlighted earlier while failing to get his attention. That was followed by my fresh suggestions of new tracks, only to meet his absence again.

**5. Volcanic rage.**

I still have great difficulty thinking of and writing about the experience to be shared below. 

On Feb. 5, 2018, I went into shock. That was in the period when Dr. Lu asked/pressed us to make some progress to report to a mid-term grant report. I took the task seriously, and tried my absolute best to make things happen in that short period of time. There was three weeks left before the deadline that Dr. Lu told us about. We were working on a protein engineering project, which the lab and I had little experience on. My first one or two tries did not meet success (my part of the task is indeed scientifically extra challenging). Based on literature, I suggested making a simple but important modification (shown by the papers I read), and was days away from seeing the results. 

In that Monday meeting, I explained my results and evidence for the modification. Dr. Lu both questioned my ability given the lack of positive results, and asked me to use a completely different approach and drop whatever I was doing. I did not agree, based on two simple points: 1. Three weeks is near impossible to explore a new path and expect sure results; 2. I was only days away from seeing whether the current approach is successful. Dr. Lu insisted that I stop carrying on with the current path. I agreed that I would work on the new approach, but also still wanted to finish and see the result the current approach. Met with a “no” without being convinced, with my mind solely focused on the most effective approach to make things work before the deadline, I mildly protested, saying “why are you asking me to stop now?” What followed was a series of traumatic moments that give me pause whenever I think of them today. Right now my mind is blank, trying to catch those broken memories to put them down. 

Dr. Lu’s face turned scary in that instant. He pointed his finger at me and yelled, “You shut up!” 

(Dr. Lu) “I speak, you listen!” 

(Dr. Lu) “……” 

I instinctively put on a submissive stance, trying to sooth the situation. Using a begging voice I tried to explain that I was sorry, I was only thinking about the project, and wanted to discuss the best way to do it… 

(Dr. Lu) “That’s not how I expect my students to talk to me!” 

(Dr. Lu) “If you don’t like how I manage the lab, get out of my lab!” 

(Dr. Lu) “Get out!” 

(Me) “I’m sorry…” 

(Dr. Lu) “Get out of my lab!” 

The exchange went longer than this, with similar words from him for some minutes. In blanking shock, I hesitantly went out of his office. I had a committed relationship at the time, which was only solidifying. I knew that if I leave Illinois, things would be too challenging. I thus knew that I had to stay, and bury my dignity. (Given how depressed I was in that period, the relationship unsurprisingly faltered. Two other students seemed to have had their relationships in tension or break due to the lab stress as well.) 

I wrote to Dr. Lu, taking everything on myself, and apologized, and explained where I was coming from. I did take everything on myself, trying to maximize the chances of making peace. I did not hear back for a week, not knowing where my fate was. When I finally managed to meet Dr. Lu again, he didn’t give me a chance to utter any word. He did not make peace either. His words were sharp, and give me several conditions to meet if I wanted to stay in the lab. One of the things he said was that I “yelled at him”. With the shock fresh in mind, my memory wondered whether it should be reconstructed. It took me time to both clarify my memory, and have more evidence about what Dr. Lu does. 

A senior member shared stories of Dr. Lu cursing and belittling him numerous times, on one occasion for an extended period of time (in the order of hour if I remember correctly) in the public hallway when lots of students were crossing by. 

Three months after me, a senior PhD student was met with Dr. Lu’s volcanic rage, and left the lab abruptly after years in the lab. In one of the emails I had a glance of, before the incident, Dr. Lu wrote something similar to, “if you can’t do this well, go find a job outside science.” 

Another student was loudly belittled by Dr. Lu for two or three hours straight in front of several lab members. (That was one of several similar occasions.) Each of the other members expressed on separate occasions that they would have broken down very soon if they were subjected to that. 

One year later, a young PhD student was yelled at after he raised doubts about having another meeting on Sunday (though I believe it wasn’t the first Sunday meeting for him). He lived in terror and distress for months, reportedly working 100 hours for weeks, eventually abandoning his scientific pursuits. 

We didn’t work our butts off to go to grad school for this. 

In my case, I remained timid, cautious, and scared when meeting him after the February incident. Dr. Lu never backtracked anything. He seemed to take advantage of and enjoy the new dynamics, and became ever more care-less in his demeaners and treatment. Slave was what I felt like, without exaggeration. I wasn’t the only one. 

The following things mentioned may be unsurprising minor points given how consistent they are with the above:

6\. For 10 years, he asked his students to work as a TA in every semester if possible.

7\. He did not give students any intellectual credits, and discouraged originality from students.

8\. I don’t know a case where he allowed students to attend outside conferences.

9\. He discouraged students’ request to engage in iGEM mentoring, though he serves as a mentor in many years. It is also worth investigating whether he simply assigned mundane parts of his lab projects involving little synthetic biology to iGEM undergrad students to benefit his own grant proposals.

10\. His treatment of students is unpredictable and largely depended on his mood. In meeting times students often shared whether he was “in a good mood”.

11\. In many cases, he implicitly drops his good promises to students once they join the lab.

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**Putting everything together in an opinionated way:**

How Dr. Lu manages his lab is hard to perceive from the outside. He is smart – in the short-term sense. He apparently doesn’t let those who are not below him to know how he is. The organizational psychologist Adam Grant said,

“We think power corrupts, but more often power reveals. As people gain influence, they feel free to show their true colors.

“The true test of character: how you treat people who lack power.”

When a student (postdoc) first joins the lab, Dr. Lu is cautious so that the student would settle down and not leave immediately. As time goes on, he slowly reveals how he expects his students to behave like. In multiple cases the transition would be sped up by some “deadline”, where “extreme measures” would be introduced, after which they don’t go away. I mentioned it in my case, but I have heard the same situation happening in different years for different people. It starts first with time confinement. Students would have little opportunity to interact with the world outside the Lu lab, and lose touch of what is “normal”. They become isolated, trapped. So they have to normalize what Dr. Lu does since that becomes the only world they know, regardless of how twisted that world is.

Dr. Lu treats students with no respect. “Slave” would be a very fitting word given how he spends no concern to their physical or emotional well-being, asks them to do what he wants and ignores them when he feels like, and pushes them to the extreme with less care than how a farmer uses their cattle. Instead of trying to develop students, Dr. Lu seems to show more investment in limiting students, shielding them away from opportunities of development, and asking them to be mindless robots instead. (He also made sure of this by telling at least one lab member, “You’ll never be an independent scientist!”)

Students bear high costs if they consider leaving, with the time already spent, with the image they would have, with lack of reference letter to a next position, on top of the fear (though out-of-touch) that maybe every lab is like this.

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Based on my interactions with current members in his lab, little has changed in how he manages his lab. Dr. Lu has been doing great in obtaining grants in the last few years, and I suspect no one has given him sufficient reasons to change.

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I stand by what I wrote in this letter with the honor of my name. And even if you don’t believe any of it, you have access to the numbers of how many PhD students went in his lab, and how they got out. We didn’t join Illinois Bioengineering just to quickly leave Dr. Lu’s lab and say damaging things about it; we came to contribute positively to science and humanity. Many will keep coming. Please help them.

**Here are my requests:**

**1. Investigate. Fully and seriously.** This won’t be the first time if an investigation does happen. When I freshly joined the Lu lab, the lab members were called to a meeting by a department administrator and asked about how Dr. Lu managed his lab. How naïve I was. -- I took on the protector role, and defended Dr. Lu against the questions put up, despite the mere months of experience in the lab. I hope it wasn’t the good job that I did, but nothing followed as I could tell. That was 6 months before I was shouted at. Please interview the students and postdocs who have worked and left the Lu lab. Ask them about what they experienced, how they left, and what they got through the lab. Be mindful, again, that the two who graduated are the vast minority. And I know they’ve been insulted and yelled at nevertheless. They also graduated when Dr. Lu wasn’t tenured, and was more cautious. You may have reservations about damaging a bright scientist’s career. I had doubts too. He’s even getting grant for plastic conversion, a sustainability topic I am also interested in (I once presented him a proposal I wrote for plastic conversion when I first joined his lab). But I have more doubts that with one’s heart not in the right place, whether he would really contribute positively. Please also consider the numerous younger scientists’ careers that are at stake, and the bigger environment we are creating if we choose non-action.

**2. Establish policies, resources, and protocols to address academic bullying.** “Illinois Computer Science Values & Code of Conduct” may serve as a reference. https://cs.illinois.edu/about/values Right now, students don’t feel such means are easily accessible. That’s why they feel helpless and desperate.

**3. Please consider these two additional measures to maximize students’ knowledge of their potential work environment:** A. Try to have all students have on-site interviews, including international students. Maximize their access to students and faculty in the department even if things have to be carried out remotely. B. Establish rotation program for first-year PhD students.

\#3 mentioned students, but postdocs are vitally important employees and human-beings as well. Many of them also come from foreign countries with great research ambitions but little knowledge of what they may be getting into. Please help them as well, by clearing the environment, and by having maximum transparency.

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I want to end with a picture that balances our worldview a bit.

In my undergrad labs in China, the professors had lunch with students on a daily basis, were friendly with every student, cared about fostering their abilities, and did their best to help even when the time investment would give no tangible return.

In my first Illinois grad school lab, the professor was organized and professional despite the large programs that he runs, and almost every student/postdoc I know from the lab went on to satisfying positions in academia or industry.

In my third Illinois lab, the professor sets the lab’s single mission as “to train the world’s best engineers and scientists”. He wrote:

> You might be asking, "\*Wait, shouldn't our mission have something to do with research?\*"
>
> No, for several reasons.
>
> 1\. If we fill our lab with the world's best scientists and engineers, great research will happen.
>
> 2\. Training is our absolute priority. If we confounded our mission with something about research, there would not be an unambiguous solution to any conflict between research and education.
>
> 3\. We cannot control how successful our research program is. The results of experiments, grant applications, and paper submissions depends on external judgements. Our overall success should not be left to chance.
>
> 4\. We are not the only ones capable of doing great science. If we don't solve a particular problem, it's likely that someone else will. However, many of our trainees can't afford a "do-over" if we fail them. Our trainees place enormous trust in our lab, so we must make their education our only mission.
>
> 5\. Granting agencies also make large investments in our lab. As an academic lab, we believe the best possible return on this investment is a highly trained workforce. Also, see Point 1.

I can write another article to document all the ways and stories Dr. Jensen invested in our training and development, in and around research. And I hope one day he writes a book about it. We are having ever greater works generated from this lab. Stay tuned. One of the things we will show is that great research doesn’t have to come from slave work.

In my current postdoc institution in Denmark, DTU Biosustain, “fostering talents” is one of the core missions of this large research center. More than just words, the center organizes programs for this purpose, and has a considerable budget for (each) employee development if they want to spend time learning new skills, even if not immediately relevant to their research projects.

Please value humans, and take action.

Yours sincerely,

Jinbei Li (Walden)

waldenjinbeili@gmail.com
Review #36
If you also had experience/knowledge of this PI, do you agree or disagree with this review? Comment below or write your own review.
phyzch
This review involve false information and personal bias. I think he try to invoke internet abuse to his previous advisor.
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Ting Lu

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