Four Questions: Tam Dao
We asked Rice’s head of research security to tell us about his job.
Spring 2025
By Katharine Shilcutt
Tam Dao joined Rice’s Office of Research Security in 2023 as the assistant vice president for research security. His background includes both academia and security — he was a tenure-track professor in counseling psychology at the University of Houston before joining the FBI, where he served in several roles for 12 years, including overseeing the FBI’s Counterintelligence task force.
At Rice, Dao is in charge of a wide-ranging and collaborative effort to protect intellectual property. “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,” he says.
How does counterintelligence and espionage relate to research?
Espionage, as we know, has been going on forever — in many cases, it’s foreign governments 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 of Rice, and that encompasses a number of things. It doesn’t necessarily have to be a tangible product that we put safeguards around, like a Coca-Cola formula. In the context of academia, a lot of times, our ideas are not tangible. Our job is to identify that IP and then try to protect it or safeguard it from both domestic and international threats.
Tell us more about the use of new generative AI tools to enhance research security.
Rice researchers developed a tool called PRISM (Preventive RISk Monitoring) to make identifying and analyzing research security risks more efficient and effective. It’s a groundbreaking advancement in research security designed to significantly reduce false positives — a persistent issue with many existing tools and software that I strongly feel contributes to racial profiling and targeting of individuals from China.
By employing a triangular algorithm, PRISM effectively minimizes false positives, mitigating the risk of reputational harm and ethical concerns. Our goal is to ensure that security evaluations are data-driven, objective and free from bias, preserving both research integrity and individual careers.
On the lighter side, who is your favorite fictional FBI agent?
My favorite fictional FBI character is Special Agent Fox Mulder from “The X-Files.”