Published by the Free Press on 7/10/2025 Shay Laps arrived at a prestigious Stanford University research laboratory from Israel in April 2024 with a mission to develop a type of insulin that could transform diabetes treatment. He had won the job after interviews more than six months earlier, and his credentials included a PhD, a groundbreaking method for protein synthesis, and the recommendation of a Nobel Prize winner. By October 2024, however, Laps was gone from Stanford. He had been locked out of the lab, his research sabotaged and his reputation threatened, according to a lawsuit he filed Thursday in a federal court in California. The lawsuit alleges antisemitic discrimination, retaliation, and deliberate institutional indifference. Why did everything go wrong? The lawsuit alleges that the October 7, 2023 Hamas attack on Israel “was a match to tinder at Stanford,” igniting pervasive antisemitism that targeted Laps from the moment he walked into the lab. During the hiring process, lab director Danny Hung-Chieh Chou had circulated Laps’s curriculum vitae, which made clear that he had served in the Israeli Defense Forces, and lab members also knew that he was Jewish and Israeli, according to the lawsuit. “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,” Stanford said. But Stanford acknowledged in a May 2024 report that there was a “widespread and pernicious” climate of antisemitism and anti-Israel bias on campus, particularly in its medical school and science labs like the one Laps joined. The report included examples of Jewish students being harassed, faculty members being accused of Zionism for wearing yarmulkes, and administrators dismissing concerns with statements such as “Antisemitism is institutional. There’s nothing I can do.” In 2023, the U.S. Department of Education under President Joe Biden opened a Title VI investigation into Stanford for national origin discrimination related to Jewish and Israeli students. The investigation hasn’t resulted in a formal enforcement action, but Stanford is widely seen as being watched closely by Trump administration officials who are taking aim at antisemitism at U.S. colleges and universities. Laps alleges that the research assistant in the Danny Chou Lab told Laps during their first interaction on his first day never to speak to her. She allegedly delayed his orders for lab equipment, made him sit elsewhere at lunch, and reassigned her custodial duties to him. Colleagues followed her lead, ostracizing him from the lab community, the suit claims. The lawsuit alleges that the October 7, 2023 Hamas attack on Israel “was a match to tinder at Stanford,” igniting pervasive antisemitism that targeted Laps from the moment he walked into the lab. The most explosive allegation is that the same research assistant, Terra Lin, tampered with Laps’s research. After he synthesized compounds designed to mimic insulin, Lin ran the lab tests—and returned what appeared to be breakthrough results, according to the suit. But when Chou retested the samples, the results didn’t hold. Laps alleges that Lin had spiked the insulin, and then urged him to destroy the samples “in order to set him up to be accused of research fraud, which could have ended his career.” Instead of investigating the alleged sabotage, Chou tried to force out Laps, according to the suit. Laps claims that he was told that Stanford’s Title IX office had opened an investigation into his conduct and advised him to leave the country. Laps alleges that he was told by the Title IX office that no such investigation actually existed. Laps claims that he was locked out of the lab after reporting what happened, including by writing to Stanford president Jonathan Levin directly. Stanford also allegedly revoked its support for a prestigious research grant Laps had secured from the Juvenile Diabetes Research Foundation, telling him that he hadn’t made sufficient progress despite Chou’s praise of Laps as “exceptional” and “remarkable.” Laps resigned last February. Lin, Chou, and Levin couldn’t be immediately reached for comment about the lawsuit’s allegations. Laps claims that Stanford cost him a prestigious fellowship, years of his career, and “most distressingly, an opportunity to use his talents to help the world,” the lawsuit says. “Stanford used its gravitas to bury Dr. Laps’s claims, and ultimately, Dr. Laps himself, rather than address its acute antisemitism and anti-Israel bias.” The lawsuit seeks various forms of damages and unpaid wages, a declaration that Laps was defamed by Chou, an order against Stanford not to discriminate, harass, or retaliate based on Jewish or Israeli identity, and other actions.