A Jewish Israeli researcher faced “discrimination and insidious, malicious conduct intended to permanently tarnish his reputation and career” at Stanford University, including “tampering with his lab results and manufacturing a bogus complaint against him, merely for being Israeli,” according to a federal lawsuit filed on Thursday.
The suit, brought by the Louis D. Brandeis Center for Human Rights Under Law and the firm Cohen Williams, accuses the private school in Stanford, Calif., of being “complicit in permitting an environment saturated with intimidation and harassment of Jewish and Israeli students to flourish on campus.”
Shay Laps, a postdoctoral researcher, arrived at Stanford roughly six months after the Hamas-led terrorist attacks in southern Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, having been recommended by a Nobel laureate, according to the lawsuit. He aimed to “develop his research of synthetic and ‘smart’ insulin, which would revolutionize treatment for millions of people suffering from diabetes,” the Brandeis Center stated.
He faced extensive discrimination in the lab of Danny Chou, an associate pediatrics professor at Stanford, per the lawsuit, including tampering with his research, a fabricated sexual harassment complaint against him and being locked out of a lab.
“I was just shocked by the set of facts,” Rachel Lerman, vice chair and director of appeals and critical motions at the Brandeis Center, told JNS. “We all think we’ve seen it all, but this guy, he’s really traumatized by what happened.”
‘Fraudulent results behind his back’
On Laps’s first day, Terra Lin, a research assistant in the lab, who “knew nothing about him other than that he was a Jewish scientist from Israel,” told him “never to speak with her in person” and if he needed anything, he must do so in writing, according to the Brandeis Center.
“When Laps tried to join a group of co-workers, including the lab staffer, for lunch, the lab staffer instructed Laps not to sit with her or other lab employees. She also urged other researchers in the lab to shun Laps,” the Brandeis Center stated. (According to the suit, Lin also tried to “frustrate, delay or inhibit” Laps’s requests for research materials and equipment, at one point referring him to a colleague recovering in the hospital from a major car accident.)
According to the Brandeis Center, she tampered with Laps’s research, “producing fraudulent results behind his back that could have ruined his career and encouraging him to discard all evidence of her tampering.” It added that when Laps found out about such sabotage, the lab’s leader and his mentor “refused to address the issue.”
The following month, Chou told Laps that Stanford would launch a Title IX investigation against him over a complaint of sexual harassment from an undergraduate student, urging him to leave the lab to avoid the investigation and to save his reputation.
Laps, who had never been accused of anything before, was shocked, Lerman told JNS.
When the Israeli researcher contacted the school’s Title IX office, he was told that no formal complaint had been filed against him; thus, there was no investigation. The office had received an email stating that Laps violated university rules, but told him it couldn’t confirm the author.
Given that Chou told Laps about the report, the lab leader “was apparently involved with the scheme,” the lawsuit states. “The Title IX office saw it for what it was, baseless, and closed the matter.”
Laps filed a discrimination complaint with the university about his treatment in Chou’s lab, prompting the university to open an investigation. In response, Chou terminated Laps, deactivated his badge and locked him out of the lab, according to the lawsuit. His access was later restored when Stanford intervened.
Stanford concluded that Laps, who has since resigned from Stanford and left the country, did not face discrimination, nor did Chou retaliate against him. The lawsuit alleges that those conclusions were “predetermined.”
It further alleges that the university retaliated against Laps by rescinding two of the three years it had promised for his postdoctoral research, causing him to lose out on a prestigious grant that had been awarded to him.
“Stanford takes any allegation of antisemitism very seriously. In this instance, and based on all the allegations that Dr. Laps reported directly to the institution, a thorough internal investigation found that they were unsubstantiated,” Dee Mostofi, assistant vice president of external communications at Stanford, told JNS.
Lerman told JNS that the Brandeis Center sees “it as part of a trend that we’re seeing lately with universities very badly treating Israeli students and postdocs.”
The center opted to file in federal court, rather than a complaint to the U.S. Education Department, due to the severity of the damage to Laps’s reputation, the financial losses he sustained and a lack of clarity from the Education Department about the timeframe for complaints, Lerman said.
Stanford must compensate Laps and “take steps to address antisemitism on their campus, which their own internal investigation shows is pretty rampant, and yet things like this are going on,” Lerman told JNS.
“We also include facts about some of what undergraduates have experienced, and I can imagine as we learn more, we might amend our complaint to add things,” she said.
