BY KATHARINE SHILCUTT
Tam Dao leads Rice’s Office of Research Security and co-hosted two important events at Rice’s Baker Institute for Public Policy in 2024: the first workshop funded by the National Science Foundation on research security May 22 to 23 and a dialogue between leadership from the FBI and AAPI leaders on discrimination toward Asian American academics June 6. Both events brought together colleagues from across the world who are invested in keeping their institutions’ research safe and secure.
What’s your background?
Before I came to Rice last June, I was an assistant professor on the tenure track at the University of Houston in the counseling psychology program. I spent a number of years there and then transitioned to the FBI, where I have been for the last 12 years working various types of violations — mostly counterintelligence and espionage-type matters.
How does counterintelligence and espionage relate to research?
Espionage, as we know, has been going on forever, which is foreign governments in many cases targeting information kept at a confidential or classified level. There has been a slight transition within the last 10 or 12 years in that foreign governments continue to target confidential and classified information, but they’ve also started to target research — which is not necessarily classified — including the fundamental research and cutting-edge research that’s often found inside academic institutions or health care settings.
What is research security?
It’s not a new concept, but it’s evolving. The goal of research security here is to protect the intellectual property (IP) of Rice, and that encompasses a number of things, including the know-how or the means to do certain things. So it doesn’t necessarily have to be a tangible product that we put safeguards around, like a Coca-Cola formula, which is easy to protect because we know exactly what that IP is. In the context of academia, a lot of times, our ideas are not tangible. So our job is to identify that IP and then try to protect it or safeguard it from both domestic and international threats.
What drives you to do this work?
Rice has produced great research for years, and something that always amazes me is how smart people are and what incredible things they develop and accomplish here. Rice hired me and another FBI agent, Paul Zukas, who works with me as the director of research security, because we bring a lot of experience from the FBI. This has allowed us to provide education, awareness, risk mitigation and risk management to help our faculty collaborate with overseas partners and entities. Collaboration is the bread and butter of how we succeed, so our job is to help our faculty collaborate in a way that is done with integrity and based on the values and principles that have driven the research ecosystem for decades. We provide awareness and education in order to decrease the burden on the principal investigators so they can keep working on their amazing projects and research.