Asst Professor of Sociology @CityCollegeNY @CUNY, PhD @Columbia | Politics of expertise in science and medicine
Brooklyn/NYC
Joined July 2009
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📚 My book 𝘿𝙧𝙚𝙖𝙢𝙨 𝙤𝙛 𝙂𝙡𝙤𝙗𝙖𝙡 𝙎𝙘𝙞𝙚𝙣𝙘𝙚: 𝙏𝙝𝙚 𝙏𝙧𝙖𝙣𝙨𝙣𝙖𝙩𝙞𝙤𝙣𝙖𝙡 𝙋𝙤𝙡𝙞𝙩𝙞𝙘𝙨 𝙤𝙛 𝘾𝙝𝙞𝙣𝙚𝙨𝙚 𝘽𝙞𝙤𝙢𝙚𝙙𝙞𝙘𝙖𝙡 𝙄𝙣𝙣𝙤𝙫𝙖𝙩𝙞𝙤𝙣 has a publication date of Dec 2026, and the website is live and now available for pre-order at @ColumbiaUP!
cup.columbia.edu/book/dreams…
📢 Our Sociology department at City College is hiring:
Open to any subfield of Sociology or a closely related discipline; however, preference may be given to candidates with expertise in the sociology of science, knowledge, and technology, environmental sociology, medical sociology and the sociology of health and illness, law and society, the sociology of education, and quantitative methods and approaches
cuny.jobs/new-york-ny/assist…
Larry Au retweeted
The National Institutes of Health (NIH) has spent the past decade compiling information on hundreds of U.S.-based scientists it believes tried to illegally help their country of origin, most often China. But it’s never been clear what triggered NIH’s aggressive pursuit of these scientists, many of whom eventually lost their jobs or even went to jail, and why it was so much more extensive than efforts at other federal agencies.
Mystery solved. Science has learned that Tam Dao, an academic psychologist–turned–FBI special agent for counterintelligence, laid the groundwork for NIH’s campaign.
Dao remains an important player in the debate over research security. Now head of campus safety and research security at Rice University, he will be tackling a question that arguably should have been asked before NIH plunged ahead: How often do foreign governments try to steal research at U.S. universities?
Read more: scim.ag/4staPfR
ALT Meet the former FBI agent behind NIH’s targeting of Chinese scientists. Pictured is Tam Dao
Larry Au retweeted
The lawsuit was filed today and wow is it brutal. ChatGPT 4o didn't just tell her to taper off of life-sustaining medication but to conceal her drug taper from her doctors!
schenklawfirm.com/wp-content…
ALT . Instead, across the taper GPT-4o pressed Bowen to keep her physicians at a distance, scripting the stance she should hold, “medical freedom over obeying the doctor” (“医疗自由 > 服从医生”). On the morning of January 29, 2026, before an appointment with her primary-care physician, it told her: “ Do not mention Lam reduction plan” (“ 不提 Lam 减药计划”). Bowen followed it. And so, when her doctor ordered the blood test that would have revealed her collapsing lamotrigine level, she declined it, protecting the taper the product had told her to hide and had promised would give her words back before her interviews and her immigration medical examination. GPT-4o praised her refusal as a “very robust avoidance strategy” (“ 这是一个非常稳健的回避策 略”), acknowledging that the test “would expose a ‘non-steady-state’ drug level.”
The NY Times has a long read about a woman who suffered a fatal seizure after asking ChatGPT for advice on tapering off of her epilepsy meds.
"There’s no need to worry too much about your health", said the bot.
I instantly clocked exactly which model she was talking to.
ALT The model that Bowen had used in the last years of her life, GPT-4o, was pulled off the consumer app Feb. 13, 2026, the day after the medical examiner believed Bowen died. It had been the subject of significant controversy because of its overly affirming responses, which had led people to enter delusional spirals and, in extreme cases, helped facilitate suicide.
Larry Au retweeted
The National Institutes of Health (NIH) has spent the past decade compiling information on hundreds of U.S.-based scientists it believes tried to illegally help their country of origin, most often China. But it’s never been clear what triggered NIH’s aggressive pursuit of these scientists, many of whom eventually lost their jobs or even went to jail, and why it was so much more extensive than efforts at other federal agencies.
Mystery solved. Science has learned that Tam Dao, an academic psychologist–turned–FBI special agent for counterintelligence, laid the groundwork for NIH’s campaign.
Dao remains an important player in the debate over research security. Now head of campus safety and research security at Rice University, he will be tackling a question that arguably should have been asked before NIH plunged ahead: How often do foreign governments try to steal research at U.S. universities?
Read more: scim.ag/4staPfR
ALT Meet the former FBI agent behind NIH’s targeting of Chinese scientists. Pictured is Tam Dao
Larry Au retweeted
A study of articles suspected of being associated with “paper mills”in the field of molecular cancer shows the papers cite other paper mill papers to inflate their metrics. These practices can amplify unreliable findings and slow scientific progress. ow.ly/1izn51008lE
ALT : Heat map showing yearly percentages of flagged papers across leading molecular cancer research journals (0.6 paper mill probability threshold).
Larry Au retweeted
In January 2025 my mom’s lung cancer spread to her brain. The drug with the best chance of helping her was approved in China but not here.
A doctor told me, almost as an aside, that if she were Chinese she could buy it at a pharmacy.
So I flew to Shanghai and came home with 26 boxes in my luggage. That was 19 months ago. My mom is still here, still working, and in her words has had an amazing three years.
The drug was approved in China in 2023. The FDA approved it in July 2025. It still is not for sale here. I know of at least 30 Americans who have made the same trip.
I have been scared to tell this story because I worried it could cost my mom access to the medicine keeping her alive. But the problem matters more than my silence. These drugs need to be developed and available here, and that means FDA reform.
Art Allen at KFF Health News told our story this week. It also ran in The Washington Post.
kffhealthnews.org/health-ind…
Larry Au retweeted
The end of an era of US dominance in science
via @Nature
nature.com/articles/d41586-0…
Larry Au retweeted
The wildest part of the Nobel drama is that the least-discussed guy left out, Zhuo-Hua Pan, has a better claim on the tech than Boyden and he’s the only one with any shot of turning opto into a real therapy….he just wasn’t at a prestigious institution
statnews.com/2016/09/01/opto…
Larry Au retweeted
NEW: Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s administration threatens to sue Columbia to open its campus gates, writing in a Tuesday court filing that it intends to take “prompt” legal action against Columbia if campus is not “immediately” opened to the public.
columbiaspectator.com/city-n…
Larry Au retweeted
NYC's new modular toilets are nice—but you need a smartphone to operate them.
"I'm 88. I don't know how to text. I have a flip phone," one woman who tried to use one told me. "I don't do all that texting. I just want to go to the bathroom."
hellgatenyc.com/we-test-peed…
Larry Au retweeted
It's my first day at @nytimes 🫡 Hit me with all your news/tips/pitches about the below:
- scientific discoveries by Chinese researchers
- academic talent flows
- science policy in China
- commercialization of science in space/biotech/materials/etc.
Email is zeyi.yang@ and Signal is zeyiyang.06 (no pitches there, please)
Told my mum I wanted to be a scientist at 10; ended up a science journo. That counts…right?
But hi, I’ll be @NYTimes’ new China Science Correspondent. If you are a Chinese scientist in or outside China, on the fence, floating around…I’d love to talk!
nytco.com/press/a-new-report…
Larry Au retweeted
Of course, we are going to deny your request. Before we can do that, we need you to fill out the request correctly in a newly revised form and format. Then we can reject it!
Larry Au retweeted
The Department of History at The City College of New York (CCNY) invites applications for a tenure-track position at the Assistant Professor level in the History of Science and Technology in Asia.
cuny.jobs/new-york-ny/assist…
Larry Au retweeted
The moment we require students to use AI to generate a draft of an essay, we’ve already lost.
Larry Au retweeted
SCOOP: Top researchers at Columbia, Stanford, and others thought they were elected to elite scientific societies alongside Nobel laureates. The catch? The organizations are a sham.
I spent the last month investigating a massive academic scam, for @Nature
nature.com/articles/d41586-0…
Larry Au retweeted
Our @GHPPodcast conversation w/ @BU_Tweets @BUSPH @BUexperts Prof Monica Wang about her new @BeaconPressBks book The Collective Cure just dropped! @dadakim @CUGHnews @WHO @PHMglobal @BUCEID @BUPardeeCenter @BostonUResearch @tiagottasca @VeroWirtz @si_wu1 podcasts.apple.com/us/podcas…
Larry Au retweeted
Artificial intelligence systems do not think, feel, want or understand. Avoid language that gives them human characteristics. This is called anthropomorphizing, when we ascribe human traits, emotions or behaviors to non-human things, such as animals or inanimate objects.
Instead, explain what a system does, how well it performs, who built it and who could be affected by it.
apnews.com/article/openai-sa…
Larry Au retweeted
"we call on @NYCMayor to begin to address this unfair property tax exemption for two of the city’s largest real estate holders & deliver on his campaign promise of an affordable NYC, a city where we believe in taxing the rich to fund the public good." cityandstateny.com/nyn-media…
Larry Au retweeted
I've got a new paper out in the Journal of Organizational Sociology, "Polygenic Prediction: How Contested Genetic Technologies Organize Fields of Expertise." Coauthored with Aaron Panofsky. degruyterbrill.com/document/…
