UCLA Professor Faces 219 Years in Prison for Selling Missile Technology to China

The iconic Royce Hall building is pictured on the campus of the University of California, Los Angeles. ACasualPenguin/Pixabay

A UCLA adjunct professor in the Engineering Department faces up to 219 years in federal prison for stealing missile technology and selling it to a Chinese company.

Yi-Chi Shih was arrested in January and convicted in a federal court on June 26 on all 18 counts in a federal grand jury indictment, according to a July 2 release by the U.S. Justice Department. He was found to have been involved in an illegal scheme to obtain monolithic microwave integrated circuits (MMICs) from an unnamed American company and smuggle them to the Chinese company Chengdu GaStone Technology.